


Pygmalion Redux

by donttouchthefigs



Category: Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: F/M, it started out as smut but now it has a plot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-01-25 07:17:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21352357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/donttouchthefigs/pseuds/donttouchthefigs
Summary: Mason Verger is dead. Now there is nothing keeping Hannibal Lecter from growing closer to the disgraced Clarice Starling than his own resistance, growing weaker by the day. Clarice, alone and abandoned by the men and institutions she swore loyalty to, has nothing left to keep her from seeking comfort in the only truthful place she has ever known: the presence of Dr. Lecter.
Relationships: Hannibal Lecter & Clarice Starling
Comments: 20
Kudos: 59





	1. Chapter 1

"Mason Verger is dead."

"Dead?"

Clarice Starling felt the molding of her kitchen's doorframe keen against her spine, straight and rigid as she leaned, cradling the phone to her cheek. From her fingers fell the thick sheaf of coupons Ardelia had left for her. Clint Pearsall's voice was low and scratchy in the receiver as if he had just woken up or simply never slept. His words were in time with the heavy beating of her head from her long unpleasant visit with ole J. Daniels last night, but she heard every word clear as a bell over the faint ringing of many phones in his background, like crickets at dusk.

"Yes, his sister called the police this morning, having found him in his room. His nurse-or his servant-was dead in the other room-"

"The playroom?" Quickly Clarice closed her eyes and envisioned the outgrowth of the Verger mansion, walking through it in her memory.

She heard Pearsall begin to swear under his breath. He may not have been effective, wise or even well seasoned, but he at least had some soft spots in which the vices of rich men could poke. "Yes. Two dead-"

"How?"

A beat of silence and Clarice could feel the reproach in the gap. She was too eager, too quick, no solemnity for the dead. But her blood was up, and she felt it racing, might have even felt the thick warmth of Migg's on her cheek.

"Decapitation."

In her mind, Clarice is under the hot light in Mason's room. Her determination to stare at him and not be shaken had stolen her chance to get her bearings. Mason talking-about camp, about Africa-there in the corner. The portable guillotine. Her eyes had been drawn to it, like a child gazing on an illustration in a picture book to emphasize the point. Pearsall, talking again.

"There's evidence of trauma, anal molestation while he was alive."

"What was in his mouth?"

Another pause, longer this time, and suddenly her nose was filled with the scent of cement and trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. But she was on the other side of the bars. She rubbed her palm on her jeans, wiping away the nonexistent crumbs that clung to her skin from Dr. Lecter's bolted desk.

"I can tell you what wasn't: his tongue."

"That's all?"

"And a candy bar."

Clarice pressed the phone against her chest-then against her shoulder, not wanting her boss to hear her racing heart. _It's him. It's not him. It's him and not him at the same time._ All the symbolism of a child-rudimentary. The poacher had been Lecter through and through. Had the man been the animal he was treated like, it would have been a clean kill, and a fine extraction or organs with clean precise cuts, careful with the ingredients he picked.

A clumsy reenactment? But too complex to simply try and pass off blame to the monster because his name was currently in the paper. Someone trying to frame Lecter, but having the patience, opportunity, and calm to try to do it well. To make it look like Lecter. Not Lecter himself, she knew that for sure. But his scent lingered somewhere in the playroom.

Pearsall was calling to her, calling her name into her shirt. She pulled the phone up again. "Sorry, sir. Go on."

"Files were stolen too. Mason's hard drive, papers. Information, that kind of thing." _It's not him._ "No money." _It is him._

"What information?"

"Federal information. Mason had a senator in his pocket, had a direct line of communication." It was passed the time for parlor room manners and feigning ignorance about the weight of honor in the federal system.

_It's him._ Clarice sunk to the floor, kneeling on the linoleum of the shared kitchen. _It'shimit'shimit'shim._ She wiped at her cheek. "Mr. Pearsall-"

"I've given you all I can, and even that's too much Starling. Stay quiet, keep your head down. You're smart enough to know how this looks."

"I tol-"

"I know what you said, Starling. Now listen to what _I'm_ saying. I've had my phone ringing off the goddamn hook all day-and no one is in their office. Do you understand?"

Clarice understood two things at once-the tiredness in Pearsall's voice did not come from the rush in the night that called the protectors from their beds when a predator was sighted. No, there was a rat loose in the palace and secrets ready to be spilled about those cowering behind doors with frosted windows.

The second was Pearsall's faith in Krendler's corruption, whatever he believed about Clarice. Even for the faithful, belief in the devil was what drove them, rather than hope in the Son. There was simply more evidence for the existence of the former, to the rational mind. Because they, the suits, would always take the low road and wear a fine mask to the public; they doubted anyone with a real, truthful face.

They couldn't fathom it.

For all that she had seen, all the delusions that had been stolen like mist by the rising sun, Clarice kept with her the wisdom of listening to someone who she did not like but knew more than she. Pearsall may have been the type of Agent to have to think before recognizing the scent of gun powder, but he knew how to keep himself in his office. It was a finesse Clarice lacked and disdained even more so now as the arrow of politics was firmly lodged in her heel. "I understand."

"Say nothing to no one, and wait for me. Go to the beach, visit your family, do _something_ and _nothing_." The order was all the more clear when the dial tone followed it.

Starling did not know how to feel about Pearsall helping her, and knew she should feel only slightly about it. He was covering his back and assuaging his guilt at tying the blindfold over her eyes right before she groped for the block.

She knew better how to feel about Mason-nothing. She didn't rejoice in his death-she found such practices distasteful. Mourning didn't come either. He died as he lived: in the shadows, playing with dangerous people.

But Dr. Lecter. Sitting on the floor, hearing the silence from Miggs' cell and unable to see the doctor, knowing he was there. Sitting on the floor, the phone silent in her hand and unable to fathom where Dr. Lecter was, but knowing he was close. Exhilaration then, exhilaration now. Since seeing the poacher, Starling knew he was in America, knew that he'd come back.

This was different.

_What information could Lecter need? What could he want?_ How Mason found him, where he had slipped up, what needed to be fixed. That settled nicely in her brain, expunging her of the need to further contemplate how the doctor felt about her, keeping her safely low on his lists of likes.

Her lips twisted humourlessly. The only time she accepted second place without a critical glance at the champion. Scooping up the coupons, she hung up the phone and moved to her car by rote. _Do something and nothing_.

It would look how Miggs looked, and maybe in part, it was. Though Miggs had only used her for a second of crude humor. Mason and Krendler kept her close as a favored whipping boy, their eyes bright as they roamed over her like a duck strung up in a butcher window. One wanted her for the dogs, the other wanted a taste before the wolves sunk their teeth in. Both wanted to bait out the alpha and watch him sniff the carcass.

She shopped in a haze, having to double-check the items against Ardelia's list more times than she cared to admit. She stepped away from the cart once or twice to nip down an aisle for an item, found herself walking through Verger's house trying to set up the scene from the scant information she had, only to stop short and double back to the passed item shelf. One of these journeys made sacrifice of her list and coupons.

Trapped between the scents of Tommy Girl and hairspray at dinner, however, frequent trips through the playroom, bathroom, and lingering by the eel tank made her a better co-hostess than she otherwise would have been. Her distant stares, lapses in conversation, and barely registering smiles were all the markers of a disgraced woman, deserving of their eager pity, and the perfect board to pin their own career frustrations on for the group to discuss and soundly curse. It was the most accepted Starling had felt in a while.

None of them knew about Mason. Clarice was sure even if they were told the information flat out would register the same as a foreign language spoken loudly: signaling the desired emotional response, but not understanding why. For the first time, she was a guardian of advanced information and found it a rather pathetic charge.

It did not lessen the twist of her stomach when the papers began to splash Mason's photo across their covers, handsome and smiling with a lot of perfectly white teeth. The only photos they had of him post-incident were quick hospital snapshots given a place of gruesome display on the second page of the story. But the destruction of his life did not grip her insides-it was the greasy, warm palmed hand of the tabloids that cut through the implication and the polite poison of the general news. It spit the theory that good people only admitted to after many caveats of their skepticism and doubt benefits. Lecter had killed Mason Verger for love, for protection of the woman he had marked with his kindness as clearly as he had marked Graham with his disgust.

As absurd as it sounded, Clarice recognized the mechanism. Dr. Lecter and his brand of sanity wasn't named in the psychiatric journals, they did not have a heavy Latin word for what he was, and 'monster' was only a twenty-year place holder. When faced with the unexplainable, with the incomprehensible and totally alien, we look for the familiar. Shapes in ink splatters, animals in the stars, love in the creature.

Starling felt eyes moving over her body, and no amount of wood and glass and walls could keep their gazes out. _People will say_… She felt sick most of the time and clung to the only thing constant in the world: the advice of one who knew better. She did nothing with every activity that wiled away her days. Cleaning Johnny's gun, running, grocery shopping, and sitting in her living room. Like a devout sister, she kept her head down and prayed her rosary of advice. _Do something and nothing._

She had no beach to walk on and no family to visit. She stopped by Johnny's grave once more, but lingered only a moment, uncomfortable with the kinship she found in corpses rather than people.

Jack Crawford was released from intensive care a week later. She trudged through the barely cleared muddy snow up his drive armed with store-bought biscotti and Johnny's gun. Just in case.

For all their long acquaintance, Clarice had only been to the house once, also driven by Dr. Lecter. Jack opened the door and gave her a quick flashing smile before he let her in. Without Bella, the colors seemed more muted in their 70's cottage chic. Starling saw the photo frames on the mantel had a thin layer of dust, perfect shades marred by finger brushes over some of the faces.

No Christmas cards, nothing new. It was a house where time stopped, the only break in the quantum freeze the kitchen where Jack led her. "Black and sugar?"

Clarice tried to feel touched he remembered. "Yes, thank you, sir. Sit, please." She remained standing, leaning against the doorway.

"Whatever they wanted to do to you, it's got to be delayed. They wanted to save face and show they can clean house better than Washington with the impeachment, without the squabbling. Now Mason's proven they all drop their pants for someone. Interest will wane in you. There isn't enough time."

"Maybe," Starling allowed, blowing the top of her coffee, watching her reflection ripple in the black mirror. The notion that she'd be forgotten warmed her more than the coffee-morbidly content that she was saved, burned that she would be wasted. At least she had her face intact.

It was more to be said than most.

"You've seen it before Starling. It comes in fads."

Clarice nodded. It was the reason her class was almost half female. It was the reason the few classes she'd subbed for after her were almost all male. She ought to have the same faith as her superiors: the steel comfort of the drudgery. They had tried to get her to take the fall-but a born again pedophile was juicier meat. They'd leave her alone.

"Did they tell you much about it, sir?"

"Most of it. The information stolen was mostly names, phone numbers, and contacts. Someone's covering their ass." _It's not him, but it is him._ "They were probably involved with whatever Verger was planning."

"He had a hit on Lecter," she assumed.

"Oh, they had a hit on him. His barn was rigged up with cameras, and the medicine they had-whatever they were planning on filming, they wanted Lecter awake for it. Apparently, he was keeping feral pigs in the back, to boot." Crawford shook his head and sighed before drinking deeply as if he were lamenting the loss of a football game. "It's sick but almost too bad. They could have taken each other out and saved us all a lot of trouble."

Clarice pressed the warm china of her mug to her lips until the nausea went away. _Pearls before swine_.

Had it been a simple hit, had Mason wanted to kill Lecter before he got three hots and cot on the federal dime again before the needle, she could understand. He paid for his sins with his body and face-he didn't need to pay for his tormenter with his taxes.

The torture was different. She shied from it, as it cut through her warrior's iron and sliced like the first cut of the bleating slaughter. "Who told you?"

"Lisa." Eliza was Crawford's barely utilized secretary. "She came by a day or so ago. Thought it would cheer me up that Lecter was almost got."

Starling tasted disappointment like a penny under her tongue when she looked at Crawford. She wanted John again to share her indignation with no cool delight in vengeance. She felt it keenly, like the painful tingle of a missing limb. The visit ended shortly after that, and Starling felt all the lonelier for it.

She knew Crawford hated Lecter. She knew that his name was akin to a babushka's curse in the office. Lecter was uncatchable, and it was frustrating. It chafed against Behavioral Science's purpose. But they were here to uphold the law, sworn to reason without passion. And in Starling's experience, that integral instinct of right and wrong was completely missing.

And a man being tortured for the viewing pleasure of another was more than wrong.

But despite all her years and experience, all her jaded cynicism Clarice still had the ability to learn. And in her next and very last conversation with Pearsall, she learned that her misery was novice, and mastery was far off: the information stole from Mason had both vindicated her and condemned her.

Paul Krendler was indeed in the pocket of Verger. It would be on the news in the morning, and the Bureau moles had been given the courtesy of a ten-hour heads up. Someone had dumped the Verger files. Incomplete, of course, with only a few names intact. It was like tossing seed to the pecking chickens.

He wasn't arrested yet. Pearsall has anticipated Krenlder's bluff like a senior at the blackjack table. He'd deny he knew about the bounty, claim he was only trying to keep a crucial witness and victim informed. He had the money and the backlog of favors to call on to make that excuse fly.

Paul was on paid leave, just like her and the injustice hit her in the stomach, prepping her for the next blow. With this reveal, it was almost a fact that Lecter responded to her downfall. Who else would feel safe enough to leak stolen information? Who would gain from making an entire wing of the government your enemy, unless you were already top of the list? It gave validity to the bogus ad in the paper, and to the sneering title given to the tokens Lecter had passed on: _gifts of love_. And worse, it would look as if she had directed him, steered him to that purpose for her own vanity.

Krendler's and Mason's sins were placed on her shoulders, and she could feel the weight tug her down, like the body pulling the wrists as she hung. The accusations she had flung at him had turned out to be the truth, and that was what had finished her; she was too right. From bait to wolf: either way poached.

"Hold on to your resignation letter," Pearsall had assumed into the silence. "If you leave now, they'll hang you in civil court and you'll be defenseless. Maybe they'll find out who put that ad in the paper."

Defenseless? Right. _Fuck you._ But even her rage, her familiar since she was small and cold in her orphanage bed, could do little to break through the numbness seeping into her flesh.

Hold on to her resignation-she would need it, but not now. Hold onto your resignation letter-the one she should have _written up by now_.

_Don't you understand what's happening? There was never a chance_. Ignorance burned her as it had when she first learned that it was the way she pronounced her vowels, stinking of the range, rather than any type of subpar performance that blocked her way.

Clarice did not realize she still had hope to loose until it was already slipping through her fingers. She felt the grit of her fathers' corpse cheek against her lips and recognized the cold stab of last goodbyes even as her face heated. She felt the licking flames of her burning church; her faith in the indifference of the machine had been in vain.

Hanging up the phone without much fanfare while Pearsall was still talking, gently laying the receiver into its wall-mounted cradle with a weak click.

All her life, Clarice had hungered. At first, it had been for food, and then for attention as she became a mother figure too early. Afterward, it was for achievement, for victory, _advancement_. In this past year, however, her soul had become bloated with the starvation for justice. She had grit her teeth and waited for the end of this baptism by fire, wanting to be all the purer on the other side. They would see, _they would see her finally_.

Now the realization that they were not blind-oh, no. They, friends and foes alike, saw her exactly for who she was and _that_ was her original sin. Be good, follow the rules, get the grades, the scholarship, the diploma, the criminal and it would be alright in the end. It was a lie.

_I can't change who I am, whoever the hell that is_.

Now as she stood in her shared kitchen she hungered so desperately for something the cabinets could not hold. A childish, truthful hunger for comfort. For the warmth of a hand touching her softly, to touch her hand and ground her as her foundations gave way. Starling, who had tithed a husband and children to the FBI, who's last kind touch had been on Dead Johnny Brigham's hand when she said no, desperately wished for something to hold and to hold her.

To not be alone.

The images that had once brought her strength were faded and worn, tearing as she clutched for them like pictures too long out of the closet album. The touch of her parents when she sought right and wrong was too translucent for her current need.

Clarice was so filled with skin hunger, but all she felt under her fingers was the cool glass of a bottle and tumbler as she reached out. It wasn't until the liquid hit her tongue that she realized she had not poured her Jack Daniels.

And it was on until she had fallen heavily into a kitchen chair did she realize she had touched this bottle of Chateau d'Yquem planted in her kitchen's cabinet without gloves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> Paul Delaroche's The Execution of Lady Jane Grey


	2. A Place For You

"_In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you._"

John 14 : 2

Midnight in Starling's bedroom. The drapes on her window are black-out curtains, leftover from the many mornings she crawled in after a job when the sun was rising to catch a few hours of sleep. She has nothing to rise for now and may never again, so they stand wide apart on the rail, letting in the cold blue street lights from outside, letterboxing the window.

Objects in the room are silhouetted from the beams peering up from the street, odd figures and contours, few and deadly still like stone angels awaiting a fresh body to guard. It is a shock when one such black shape moves slightly.

Passed the window, opening it a crack and bringing in a sigh of cool air and a snatch of muffled music from the neighbor; casting an inky shape on the plain comforter Clarice is tucked under, having swaddled herself tightly. She has done so for a week now, rolling up in the blanket as if it would hold her together from shattering into a million pieces. And, like every night this week, her cheeks are stiff from the memory of tears.

Hannibal Lecter knows this because he has seen it first hand.

The monster can understand the notion. He had been swaddled by the warm stones and close buildings of Florence; so bombarded on all sides by history and art that he rarely lingered in his memory palace. There was comfort in the small alleyways, the crossroads where wandering paths meandered through time and civilizations. Stepping back on American soil with the wide streets and sterile silver buildings made his skin feel clamy. No wonder this starling needed her nest.

It would have been rude to be in the area and not contact Clarice, though it had to wait until after Mason was settled into seeing The Riz. He made himself content with watching her in the forest.

Just close enough to see and catch her scent in the newly winter winds, and watch her blend into the autumn colors. It was her season, Lecter had decided. Cool and crisp like her steady head, but colored in bright oranges and reds like a fire within. Yes, in the windows of her room it is always autumn, leaves falling slowly as the doctor visits often, to replace the models.

Here, unlike the other chambers of the palace, her room has bare white walls between the windows, nothing adorning or distracting from the figure that sat in the middle, commanding attention in the rays of afternoon light. Starling was marble to him: all pale and smooth, life-like and yet unmoving in her mores, sculptures rather than stagnant flat images.

Not because he agreed with the ham-handed, now handless, Dr. Chilton. Dr. Lecter had seen too much of her ambition ever call her remote, and too much fury to ever be winter.

For the longest time, he had kept her there, to the back of his mind, sitting on the floor wrapped in a veil of her absurd principles and head lowered demurely in Monti-esque beauty. Young, the gold and browns of her tiger eyes untouched by the discoloration of age and disappointment. The monster came here time and again to break the monotony. Dealing with doctors, his most loathed task, often sent him into his palace to find amusement between the laymen explanations, appointments, and check-ups after his surgery. This chamber had been a place of quiet reflection.

Once in Florence, he traveled to the Palazzo Vecchio near the Uffizi Gallery for reference from a Greek hero. He wanted Clarice in a position she deserved now that she was an agent and her kill list was growing. The powder mark the only blemish on her new statue, the head of Jame held in her hand, her gaze the same quizzical yet bright and earnest look she had turned upon him. She became the only pleasant memory of Baltimore he chose to keep. Nothing more for the time while he was enveloping himself in the Florentine delights.

And yet with each passing year, her chamber moved a little closer up the hall. He would often conjure the image of her visage, gently molding it with maturity whenever the tabloids praised and or spit at her. She became like a favored art piece-never quite done, always needing improvement.

After seeing her run, she became Clarice of Versailles, hand on her weapon as she ran with the deer, eyes keen for danger, beautiful in her prowess. Grown now and beginning to understand her own power, untouched by the desires of her federal pantheon. She would succumb to no seduction of power or complacency.

The struggling deer was safe here, by her side.

Yet as lovely as she was and pleasant as it could be to rest his face against her faithful companion's flank and inhale the scent of decaying leaves and cinnamon, he found he wished to improve. She was still stone to him-and now he found the medium a little lacking.

He was a scientist by trade and desired accuracy in all things. And as her room edged ever closer to the doors of his palace, finding himself stepping into it just to think and pass the time, he needed more to complete it. More than pose and expression. The silence of the chamber was oppressive when all he had were her girlish whispers against the wet stones of the dungeon. He wanted to hear her and experience her rather than gaze upon her.

He wanted this room complete for when it was all of Clarice Starling that was left. He wanted it accurate so he could tell Mischa of the woman that saved her.

There was a day or two when she became The Blind Agent of Pompeii, desperately trying to escape the collapse of her career and perception of the men around her which was not at all pleasant; but it had been fascinating nonetheless. In fact, it drew his interest more. Her one hand lifted to her cheek, shielding her eyes from the flash of cameras, her other on Jack Crawford's arm (which in this room is no more than an artfully jagged crack in the stone, an improvement on the piece).

After seeing her shrugging away from the microphones and the bright lights of the TV cameras, the doctor had stood before his marble Clarice and contemplated her face, as if he could peer into her carved features and understand the workings of her grief, wanting to understand with this new flavor of her.

And still, how curious, he wished to alter again: not for his pleasure but for her likeness. It was a sisyphic circle, his desire to see her, to inhale her scents and learn her palette of colors; the sonata of her voice. The doctor would come close, watch her run, follow her in his pick up, or stroll in the crowds behind her on the street, and then retreat. A week here, a few days. He'd push against the stone of his curiosity and keep away, focusing on the task at hand, carefully doling out the stolen information to scramble the presses, confuse the suit-wearing bloodhounds, and throw off their scent.

But how easily that boulder slipped passed his fingers. One glance away, caused by a passing scent of almonds and cotton, or the slant of light through his wine that was the color of her highlights in the sun, and he would slide down that slope again, landing on his feet which found their way back to her.

He doesn't mean to trespass here. The bedroom is the most intimate room of the house, where we are most vulnerable. Like reptiles we shed our skin here, donning different armors for what we face beyond our door. Hopes and desires are whispered into the ear of dreams like a lover, and we shy from the attentions of nightmares. But it seems that Starling cannot evade this suitor forever.

No, he had not intended to enter her sanctuary. He had, a week ago, only meant to enter her kitchen, to leave his birthday gift for her and indulge in the smell of her home. Often in a new place, the first room sought out is the one which carries the most important to us rather than the master. Unfortunately it was shared: the strong tea leaves and coconut from her housemate were nice, but unfortunately contaminated the sample.

Her living room was no better as the rank stretch of liquor and gun lubricant permeates to rug and sofa. It had been easier to stay away after that visit, cleansing his palette with the smell of salt and sand on the shore.

But return he did, after contemplating a pair of lovely pearl earrings as he shopped for a replacement pocket watch. They had been small, delicate and not unlike the ones she favored in her years as an officer hidden under her hair; hiding her femininity like a nun with a wimple.

Thus, almost as he had crested the hill and thought himself done with redecorating and perhaps with America as a whole, the boulder slipped and dropped him back in her home. Tonight would make the third night in her bedroom.

The first he had merely sat and watching her sleep, fingers steepled before his mouth. In the moonlight here skin truly did take on the shade of pearl white marble, and it was quite easy to place her in elegant repose in her room. Happily, none of the garish Christmas lights from the neighbors invaded this tableau.

The second she had tossed and turned, uneasy and restless in her slumber. Her hair dropped across her cheek and blocked his view of her elfin features. With careful paired fingers, he lifted the largest strand and tucked it back with a flick. She did not even stir but the entirety of the next day Lecter liked to imagine the scent of pine from her shampoo lingered on his knuckles.

But now he would stay by the window and watch. He has danced too close to discourtesy for his own liking. Starling was his dangerous interest; near-fatal whimsy. Had she stayed in her closet, the only relic from those eight years and only a snag in the grey drop cloth that covered that time, it would not warrant the self-governance he needed now.

With every texture unearthed, the doctor desired for just a little more. He wanted to wade into Clarice Starling, face upturned and palms open as he had in Farmacia.

She stirs again, turning over, and a slender foot pokes out from under the blanket, her flesh vulnerable to the cold. The urge grips the monster, and he closes his eyes against the sight. To linger was one thing, to touch another. He can still feel the electric current brought to life in his arm from their only touch.

He wasn't sure what, or if he, would survive the contact now.

Had he felt the ground beneath him when he entered her home, the landing from his fall? Then why was he sliding down that hill again, sliding out of his chair, sliding closer to her? The doctor reached out to cup her foot. The toes curl and the discomfort flashes across her sleeping face.

Placing his hands against his neck, warming the fingers as he had in the ER for patient comfort, glad for the cool against his flushed face. He lifted the blanket to tuck her foot back inside.

The smell of almonds suffuses his face, a hint of vanilla following. From her place on the bed she radiates warmth, a wave released when he lifted the covers. It lingered over his flesh, and in the leaves of his heart there is a rustle, an awakening from deep slumber.

_Desire_.

Desire, bone-deep, poisoning his marrow, spreading through him like a heart attack. Lecter feels a crackle in his chest, spiderwebbing like shattering ice, shattering ice around his heart.

The desire not simple for base purposes but to be close to her, to touch her, to let her burn him clean where he has been so cold for _so long_

_cold like a dungeon, like winter in a barn, like empty arms, like marble, cold cold_ cold!

As he had with the safe little deer in his memory palace, he lays his cheek against her calf. But this is no remote stone, cool to the touch, firm and stable beneath his face. His lips part like a cat as he breathes her scent in. Her flesh seared him and he wouldn't be surprised if he had his own mark of courage high on his cheek.

Suddenly his stone girl is living flesh beneath him, just as strong, just as enduring but thrumming with life.

It could have been minutes, or maybe hours as he lay his head there, knelt beside her bed like a pilgrim in prayer to a relic. In such a vein, he turned and pressed his lips against her shin.

He heard the snap of static before feeling the pinprick sting on his temple. The monster froze immediately, poised on his haunches. Caught in a moment between flight and fear, his head turned like an owl's, wide-eyed and smooth.

Starling, propped up on her elbow, her own gaze heavy-lidded and sleepy. He could smell the wine on her breath, sweet and acidic as she sighed, her fingers ghosting over him as if she were attempting to make out if he was real. Her fingers brushed again, dislodging a lock of his hair, and stayed against his temple.

The monster sees the same revelation, transformation from mental portrait to human, reflected in her eyes. Starling sat up, dislodging the blankets. Lecter leaned back, arms slightly out, whether to push up from his position or ready to fight he is unsure. But his head tilts back to keep her gaze.

He had thought her elfin before-and he saw her now with her light wild eyes nearly translucent in the moonlight, and her hair now long: a feary child. And she had him, alone and loitering, in her thrall.

Starling's face is alive with the emotion he could only attempt to divine from the still features he held in his mind. He peers into her face now and is overwhelmed with discovery.

Her fingers reach out, and her gaze cuts through him. She can see the face under the work, the original drawing of his features beneath the portrait he has tried to paint. Her hands find the lies first, his nose and cheeks. Her touch leaves a trail of fire, and he can feel her shaking.

Catching that trembling limb, he presses his face to the inside of her wrist. The monster is falling after his rock of control, tumbling into her touch that strikes him down like lightning.

Her fingers thread through his hair and she sobs, head bowed and the ends of her locks brush his brow. There are no shared dungeons now, no scales to judge them now, no responsibilities to bind them. For this time there is only the touch of each other, the heat and the hunger for connection that crackles between them.

His lips find her calf again, and like starving pilgrims, continue their progress up her leg. Her hands in his sleek hair neither hinder nor encourage, combing and gripping as if to assure his existence there. He breaks with his oral travels only long enough to press into her touch like a cat.

Then there is a new scent now, deeper and more primal. Hannibal closes his eyes and savors: it is the most lifelike of all, definitive proof that she is real, that this is no tulpa run wild in his palace. Desire of a different kind now floods his palette, hunger burning in his belly. His teeth sink into the supple flesh of her thigh, but not to harm.

Perhaps her hunger only matched his-or perhaps the liquor that still clung to her tongue was still affecting her-but Starling's cry was not of pain or fear.

The sound rang into the halls of his mind, drowning out any other thought but of her. The first of her voice he has heard in over seven years-and he wanted to hear it again, wanted to make her cry an aria of her desire. He wanted to taste her flesh again. The monster wanted more, and more and greed clawed at his chest until the very clothes he wore seemed to suffocate him, until the warm skin of her legs was not enough.

Looking back there would be large gaps in the memory: when had he torn away the cotton from her hips, when he had pulled her close or when he had joined her on the bed. But as the monster bowed his head like one over the communion cup, he would never forget the throaty gasp of Clarice when his lips touched, or the cry that could have very well been a sob when he did not stop. When he was done he lapped up her tears of release as well and had never had a finer vintage.

Starling pressed her face against his thirsty kisses, her hands having never ceased over his face and hair. Now they were hungry for more: over his throat and down his chest. He is never happier than to shed the confining shirt, helping her fumbling fingers with the buttons.

His own fingers find her slender waist and pull her against him. He wanted to feel her heart hammering in her chest, feel it beat in him with his own galloping pulse. Her nightshirt was another causality to this cause.

Only a few moments to marvel at her smooth pale beauty, her spine artfully curved as she practically hung from his arm around her waist. His fingers followed the perfect line from her chin, as her head tilted back, over her throat and sternum, then back up to feel the contours her breasts, one of the rare places on this warrior that was soft; soft to his palm, his cheek and lips.

Falling, falling still, never landing even when they fell back onto her bed, his hands trapped beneath her body and now it is _her_ hands busy pulling him closer, her hands leading him, leading his mouth to hers. Lecter knows she tastes herself when her tongue drags along his and she doesn't recoil from her own desire. Exhilaration races through him as a powerful shudder.

There is a passing thought to her comfort-Starling is soft and little under the flat long lines of his own body. But her embrace is welcoming and warm and tight. She pulls him in and refuses to let go. A fist in his hair keeps his mouth captive, her free hand tugging at the last of his clothes, and after a moment of freedom, his hips are trapped in the grip of her runner's legs.

The monster determined never to be a prisoner again thinks there is no greater pleasure than to be incarcerated in Starling's hold.

Their kiss swallows any sound their consummation produces, her whimper his moan. At first, it is fast and needing. Her nails carve their signature into his back, his hands grip her hair and sheets in equal measure, one of her heels find purchase on his thigh. It is too passionate to be heavenly, and too right to be sinful.

And then their gazes aligned, and Hannibal felt the landing squarely in his heart. Their purgatorial fire consumed and burned his palace; there was nothing more in the moment but Clarice and her frank gaze, her breath, her heartbeat and her body in tandem with his.

Their foreheads met, and the end, when they harmonized their cries of pleasure, he could not tell whose tears cut tracks down her cheeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> The Veiled Woman by Rafaello Monti
> 
> Perseus with the Head of Medusa by Benvenuto Cellini
> 
> Diana of Versailles
> 
> Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii by Randolph Rogers
> 
> La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats
> 
> La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Frank Dicksee


	3. Landing

** **

**Chapter 3**

**Landing**

After two miles, Starling paused on the bank of the Shenandoah. She was not as familiar with this path along the bank as her favored one through the crowds of trees and carpet of leaves. But with the winter chill creating a thin layer of ice on the water, the open air was too chilly for the usual park-goer, and left her in the solitude she desperately needed.

Taking the water out of her pack, she forced herself to slowly gulp down half before settling herself at the trunk of a large tree. In the early morning, there was still fog hovering over the river surface, shrouding the little island where the swans nested in spring.

The cold and the focus of exercise cleared her head. Without it, she may have dissolved into panic. This way she could lay out the facts.

Firstly, Dr. Lecter had not been a wine-induced dream. If she doubted her own senses smelling his light cologne on her sheets, or the slight ache of her hips, the evidence was obvious in her hamper. A torn pair of underwear on top of her nightshirt and a washcloth. The only nice thing about waking up nude that morning were new sheets under her and no stickiness on her thighs.

Secondly, and the easiest to ascertain when she finally dressed, was that Dr. Lecter was no longer in the house. He had apparently cleaned up, tucked her in and left.

Thirdly...and the most difficult: she had slept with Hannibal Lecter.

There was no force, no tricks-true she has been rather marinated, but her memories were too vivid and too clear to blame it all on good wine. She had thought him a mirage at first, yes. Starling knew she was impertinent, but she would have never touched him so boldly had she not doubted his presence. After the first caress of features, he had made the reality of his presence well known. She had continued, like a child sneaking about after bedtime, forbidden exploration. The changes he had made, the things that stayed the same, how time had altered him and the places where nothing could.

Then he touched back.

And Clarice had not stopped him. Not once had she screamed and clawed him, pulling away and escaping. She had wanted him-he made _her fur crackle_. Starling's lips twisted in a humorless smile.

No, it wasn't just that. It was that he had touched her kindly. More than kindly. He had been laying his face against her leg, as she had seen agent widows lay their cheeks against coffins.

The hunger for another person, for the smallest scrap of decency, had overruled her well-trained mind. Lecter had looked upon her with everything other than suspicion and animal lust. His touch had been careful, curious and he had treated her gently. He had done the same to her hand, to her neck and chest and…

Clarice rubbed her cheeks.

It hadn't just been great sex. A part of her responded to the more carnal aspects, but it had been more than that.

_That should be enough_. Enough to send her spiraling. The most wanted man in the world had slid into her house and her bed and made love to her. She had sex with Hannibal Lecter, and she couldn't find a shred of panic. She hadn't rushed to the shower and scrubbed until she bled, or cried or screamed.

She had dressed, searched the house, then returned to her bedroom, sitting on the bed and staring at herself in the mirror. Staring at her neck with the three spots of purpling red, at the clear teeth marks on her thigh and feeling her whole body heat with shame. Oh, she had plenty of _shame_. She almost lost her breakfast as the shame leaked into her belly where she sat under the tree.

And that was a normal reaction. Clarice had betrayed everything she swore to uphold.

But that only clanged on the truth. She pushed herself up and wandered to the edge of the water. Focusing on the little island showed in mist, Starling pulled the tie out of her hair, the locks floating on the wind as she found the eye in the tempest of her thoughts.

Was she ashamed about having sex with the _man_ Dr. Lecter? Despite what the answer might make her, she was frank with herself.

No.

She wasn't ashamed that she had let him in her _per se_. Her feelings about the doctor had always been confusing and unsure, but her feeling that he _was_ a man was not. Monster was the title given to him, and Clarice found the word never fit; like a suit too big, it wasn't tailored to his form. She did not feel disgusted and horrified that she slept with Dr. Lecter the same way she had felt revolted when she had learned about the crime of bestiality. It wasn't like she had fucked a dog, sleeping with the monster.

And she had some inkling, young as she had been, of the attraction between them both. He was handsome and spoke well, and he liked her. Starling knew that and knew he was an extremely visual person. She had felt his eyes roam over her body, but never felt embarrassed for it: it has been a polite gaze that searched deeper than breast size and leg length. He had appreciated, but what he wanted was deeper.

So the act itself wasn't the crux of her anger.

Clarice was almost lucky it was Lecter in some sick way. Her want for a break in the silence of the machine that was the FBI might have sent her into anybody's arms-_that_-right there.

That thought constricted her throat, suffocating her with shame.

She had allowed herself to become desperate. Through all the years of going hungry, of being kicked out and ordered and challenged Clarice had prided herself on never being desperate. She had gone through the orphanage, through school and the academy with no one holding her hand, no one comforting her panics before exams, no warm blanket and kind encouragement at the end of the day. She had clawed her way up, and it was that accomplishment she clung to in lieu of a proud lineage or righteously suffering heritage.

Nothing in her blood set her up for greatness-she had achieved that.

It was the weakness that cracked her willpower and sent her into the arms of another. Starling should have been able to handle the sight of the federal swordsman, been able to give her parting speech clear and strong with all the nobility of the damned, hoping that history would judge best should it meddle with her cause. The true and just should have no need of consolation.

And she broke-she'd become needy. She had wanted and had allowed that want to make her rash. Oh, she was reckless, she had been told often enough: but it was calculated recklessness. Her skills and instinct were so well-honed that she herself was her own best bet in any shootout.

Johnny. He was dead and she lived because she was a better bet. The missing landed like a punch to the chest. Rubbing the afflicted area she focused again, the mist lifting from the copse of trees in the river.

It was also the simple fact that Starling did not know the doctor at all. Starling was no nun, despite what the last five years might boast, but a relationship was always required. Nothing was good that wasn't earned, and she had always shied from the idea of casual sex. It had made her and Mapp outliers among the female agents who sought to use 'the boys' back as much as they used them. Another principle held fast for years thrown out for one night of company.

Even if he was the most well-known stranger on earth. What did it say about her that the man who knew her best also knew her least? She bowed her head. What kind of person did that make her? Who was this person that shared her body and life but who was totally alien to Clarice now? This ignorant, desperate woman-what had happened to her, to the warrior?

_Nothing happened to me. I happened._

Why should she believe she ever was the person described in that letter that had made introductions to healing? His previous missives had contained lies-the lie that he would not call on her.

Heat in her cheeks, a burning in her chest.

Coming back, smelling as wonderful as those gifts that doomed her, leaving a scent of beautiful condemnation on her bed and flesh. She knew what the doctor had meant by not calling on her, but he never fully swore not to eat her up. And apparently he'd gotten his fill: a shot of her suffering and a chaser of sex. At least she wasn't dead.

But she was tired of taking the least.

_Rage_. Starling seethed at the thought. Anger was familiar; she knew what to do with anger. Despite the sun shining brightly the island in the river was now obscured by tears. Tying her hair up, she adjusted her pack and began running along the bank again.

How could she trust that anything about him was real if his word hadn't been? The tenderness, the tears, the gaze that had held her captive for hours, hypnotized until her body responded to his in explosive delight-even that flash of remorse, quick as lightning that struck across his face when he lay panting beside her-when his promise was not as binding as it seemed?

Another belief added to the pile, another rotting beam in her church giving way. But this anger had a sharp edge, one that poked at her heart when she held it close, bruising and then cutting. It was betrayal, quick as the hangman's lever. Just as devastating. Not the slow rot of the FBI's mask slipping to reveal the devouring teeth behind. No, this betrayal hurt so much worse, it made her sick, her stomach churning with rage and sick: having to put the doctor on the same shelf as other men when she had esteemed him so different.

Starling was glad for the cold beating against her face. It made it easier to explain the red watering eyes to Mapp when she finally made it back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> Miranda - The Tempest by John William Waterhouse
> 
> The Execution Speech of Anne Boleyn:
> 
> "...And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul."


	4. Hostage

** **

**Chapter 4**

**Hostage**

Hannibal Lecter stood in the beach-back yard of the German's house, leaning against the chest-high stone wall that gated the pleasant sitting area. Chin in his hand, he is a warm figure in red cashmere against the grey-blue of sky and sea, a lonely hostage of his own mind.

It was a strange captivity. The room that had been his project over the course of seven years was now bursting with scent and sensation. The windows flung open to carry in the almond breeze, the temperature balmy and welcoming and the piece that reigned over it all now exquisitely detailed down to the placement of scant scars and a map of faint freckles.

That sculpture now made of living flesh and radiating warmth was no longer subject to his altering, however. Now he need only glance in her direction before he was sinking deep in her presence. Come near and the figure was alive, reaching for him with a burning touch, eyes so painfully clear and bright and locked on him.

The doctor lost full hours, attempting to reconcile the situation and instead of falling flat on Starling's bed. Where in other rooms there is a moment before he sinks into memory (recalling a scent, observing an object, hearing the measure of a tune) this is instantaneous. A brush of fingers and he is all at once in her arms, his face pressed against her temple, her flushed skin under his lips, feeling her knee against his ribs.

The still smarting marks his back are a constant reminder as well, to the point where he can sense her throughout the palace, catch her scent when there was none but the salt and fresh air.

Clarice now roamed her room, free and glorious in her living visage. And instinctually, Lecter knew she would be as content with being caged as he had been. So he was exiled, a hostage to reality, keeping busy with his work to avoid her door altogether, busy with work that was now perhaps all for naught.

Fingers pinch the bridge of his new nose. Bitter disappointment, with an aftertaste of self-censor. This is a flavor he knows.

Rationally, the doctor knew he would one day be caught. He has made plans for such seasons that would pass: incarceration and incognito. But it had been a bitter disappointment when it was spineless, cowardly Will Graham who had caught him. It had been vicious whimsy to carry on the rather distasteful correspondence with Dolarhyde so he could return the gift of being trapped to Will. And while successful the act had severely limited him in an already uncomfortable situation.

Disappointment again when he had prepared for his lecture, knowing he could never return to Florence and read all the tales she had to tell, or stroll beside her and admire her beauty. Not after he finished giving Pazzi the glory shared by his ancestor, an impulse too delicious to forgo. He and his whimsy.

_Would the dottore like to include a note?_

_Why not?_

And now this disappointment, keener than the others, ached deeply, like a bone break. With her strength and courage, Starling was a phenomenon; one Lecter was grateful to witness from his uniquely intimate perspective. She was a Shakespearean tragedy in motion, a living greek hero, noble and doomed.

It was these reasons he had felt she would make the perfect place for Mischa in the world. A bitter end to her dream, but one last sweet victory for her lambs. Of course, the math wasn't yet correct. He picked at it like a stubborn matte of hair, waiting for the relief of the comb to pull smoothly through, for time to flow backward.

Lecter does not believe in fate, but he could not deny the perfect symmetry of the situation. The anniversary of Mischa's death so hard upon the heels of Starling's birthday, the innocent cut down too soon, the way they had both barreled into his life as an annoyance and placed an ever-fixed mark on his soul.

It had been an idea that gave him a little purpose, a project to return to in quiet moments that had quickly turned into a focus. One Starling surely would understand, clever as she was, willing to walk with him down paths of thought that could frighten; even concerning Sammy who inspired as much disgust as pity in her. She understood the plight.

A hero damned by her own inability to bow to the corrupt and self-serving. She would die a pitiful end by their hands, a whimper of an ending so unfitting for the woman she was. Hannibal wanted to bestow a better death upon her, one she might even welcome. Free from pain at least and in turn, saving one of the purest lambs sacrificed. Her end would be the perfect counterbalance for Mischa's beginning.

He asked nothing of her he would not willingly give himself.

And it had been his whimsy, his personal fascination separate from his academic curiosity, that had destroyed the chance before it had even begun. He had slept with her, he had changed their connection fundamentally. With a single touch in Memphis, they had been connected forever. With another in Virginia, he had severed the only lifeline to his sister.

Hannibal had let her die all over again-had swung the ax himself.

He pushed off the wall and wandered back into the kitchen. Reaching into a drawer he pulled out a book of matches. Finding a cigarette, he returned to the sand, cupping his hand around the little flame, protecting it from the breeze until it served its purpose. Perhaps it is the cold off the water and the winter chill that makes his palms tremble and the flame dance erratically.

He had permanently altered Clarice's place in the world, in his world. How could she be the balance to his equation now that he knew what he did, what he ought not to?

_Starling, pale in the moonlight once the shirt is removed, pink infusing the marble white across her chest and cheeks. A real woman no longer his marble girl. Starling, burning heat in the ice-cold room. Clarice's forehead pressed against his, breath mingling, her fingers gripping his hair to keep him close, hips rising to meet his halfway, giving as much as she took, sharing his wanting. Soft and smooth over steel muscles, feeling her heartbeat, feeling the silky skin of her breast under his cheek, on his tongue and then she pulls him back up to steal back her kiss, tasting _him_, exploring _him _with such urgency..._

Doctor Lecter swallowed and flicked the ash that had collected on the edge of untouched his cigarette. He took his first and last drag and realized the tightness of his body.

He wasn't deprived: he had indulged in Brazil and even in Italy before making his way to Florence. And there, Madam Pazzi was beautiful and intelligent. He had looked forward to discussing the poetry he was studying while they caught their breath in between.

But this was different-brought so quickly and viciously; not only of his body but his mind. He was dragged under an ocean of sensation but never drowned.

A new heat now: anger. Unfamiliar but quickly learning, Lecter felt anger as he paced the sands until he could walk comfortably again. What a ridiculous thing, to be so manipulated by a simple physical act. He was a creature of intellect and control. He had seen pretty faces and prettier bodies and never let himself fall into hedonistic gluttony. Would he let this woman destroy him so? He had already let her allure steal his sister's future, his hope, and even his _reason_. He, standing on American soil, was proof enough of that.

Clarice Starling was indeed a phenomenon, but she wasn't benign. Her title as Death Angel was becoming manifest even when she was not present to pull the trigger. She had shot straight through his defenses, and the bullet of her presence had shattered in his mind, embedding shrapnel of her into every part of him. It would take years to pull out the pieces, and the act itself might even become fatal. But he would not go to his death quietly, he would not lose his chance to bring the teacup back together.

This could not continue. If he intended to remain free, he must resolve this problem with the same efficiency that had dispatched Mason, except there would be no Margot proxy this time. He would have to return and conquer himself, find some way to be near Clarice and in control.

Or he would have to eliminate the volatile factor altogether.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> The Hostage by Edmund Blair Leighton


	5. The God of Time

Chapter 5

**The God Of Time**

Dark again in Starling's bedroom. She is asleep under her cover, laid out flat her hands under her pillow. Even dressed in her oversized The Police shirt she is beautiful in repose. What cannot be seen from the casual observance is her palm laid flat on Brigham's gun under the pillow, and the set of cuffs tucked under her hallowed out tissue box.

Clarice is not the best actress in the world, but years of training and smiling in the face of bureaucratic danger has taught her some level of deception under the gun. When she hears Lecter enter, when a slight movement of cracking open a window shakes her from her light sleep she does not give away a telltale stiffening. Instead, her breath comes as deeply as it would with only a slight hitch added for flavor.

She slit her eyes once and sees his shadow-he is on the other side of the room, in front of the window. Her clock reads an hour before dawn.

The doctor takes his seat in the only good chair in the house-a purchase made to warm the home with the idea of buying the matching vanity at some later date. He watched her and lingers over the image of her dark lashes curved across her smooth cheek, marred only by courage. She is a beautiful woman, he acknowledges that. And he knows how soft her flesh is, he acknowledges that as well with some heat.

Lecter allows himself to cross his legs, but the rest of his control must come from within. Long moments of silence and Lecter's breathing slows, almost a match for hers. He does not come closer, gives no indication he is coming closer, gives Starling nothing but a slight ache in her back from holding her position.

The sun is rising soon, the thin fingers of morning slithering in to peel back the dark and the doctor does not move. Starling feels a little lick of panic in her chest. How long will he stay? What is he planning? Is she ready now, to throw off the mask and hold him at gunpoint, to end his life as surely as slipping the needle in herself? For that would be the result. In all her anger, in her righteous daydreams of holding him to account with her unregistered steel, she had not thought about the fallout.

Is she ready to have all she sought after?

Clarice, however, is robbed of this choice tonight. For Lecter does move. Does make noise. A thin, whining keen silenced nearly at birth. It is enough to rip her from her pillow, twisting in the covers to face him.

Lecter sitting in her chair, darkened by the rising sun behind, bent nearly double by his shadows. His eyes are fixed shut, hands tight on the arms of her chair. She can see his lips move; they complete one silent verse. Then the red gaze is upon her.

The light of her hair in the morning, deep chestnut with the honey gold crowning her locks. Honey and brown, warm against the stark white of her sheets her empty walls. _The little deer all full of fall's warmth, struggling against the barren white of snow, dragged to its death. Mischa's wide eyes and frightened face as she's dragged in her little white nightgown smeared with the grim of the barn as she's dragged to the stump. Starling's face shocked and white before him as she stares at the agent of her death._

Failure then, failure now.

Lecter lifted his face to her and feels the breeze waft from the window crack. In his palace the icy breath of winter blows through the halls, the trap door flinging open and the stench of mud and iron and waste pungent, infecting the air around him. His hand flies to his face, clapping over his nose and mouth. He bends, curling in into himself, bowing to the panic, leaning forward, against the twisting pull of time dragging him ruthlessly towards the dungeon of memory.

Cold, cold air, freezing his lungs as he gasps into his palm. The image suspended in his mind, the deer's panicked rolling eyes, Mischa's pale face red from screaming, Clarice shocked and afraid. The deer is Mischa, then Mischa Clarice, Clarice the deer the deer Clarice and then Mischa then and then and then and then

Panic racing in his blood demanding movement, demanding action release relief-release! Freedom, from the iron smell of the ax the iron smell of his sister's blood, from this tug backward as he feels the very foundations of his mind tilt and slide him towards the trap door.

Clarice hesitates, understanding for what she is seeing sluggish. For her own vast knowledge of terror, it is long moments before she recognizes her own pain reflected him, the plight etched into the lines of his form, curled and straining, humming with failure and pain. Tears sting her eyes as the understanding blossoms along her consciousness, and she can see the connections between her star and his; the lonely constellation they make.

Lecter emits the high metal scream again, biting his lip now to stifle it. Turning his face from her, shaking, and losing the battle against his memory. Her fingers release the cold comfort of her weapon and stretch across the years, brushing his crown.

The doctor knocks her touch away. Reaching for her throat, grabbing her face instead when she flinches away. His fingers steel on her soft skin, and Starling sees his teeth bared, ready claw through her sympathy with animal savagery. He needs to end the pain-to kill the panic.

"Doctor!" It is not a plea for her life. It is half shock and half calling, calling him back from where he has retreated, from where he has been dragged.

_Doctor! Doctor Clarice cries, again and again, her head thrown back against her pillows. Doctor, she whimpers as she clutched his hair and brings him to her lips. Doctor, the strained whimper punctuating her moans as their bodies rock with the primal rhythm. Doctor she whines as he opens his murderous mouth over her breast and suckles, inhaling the scent of almonds and pine and flesh and desire._

Warmth bursts under his palm, along his arm as he crushed Starling's body to him, one knee on her mattress. Heat, glorious summer heat sets fire to his flesh, savagely fighting back the sharp icicles of a winter-long since melted. Lecter shakes as he rips himself from the long reach of memory, claws his way to Starling's room, the light weak but still fighting against the dark of the oubliette, clawing until the warmth of her chamber infuses him, clawing until her shirt is torn and no barrier is between his reach and her skin.

There is nothing of the barn in this room. It is bright it is clear and warm and stable. The floor does not tilt to throw him off-kilter, there is no yawning chasm in which he may fall. There is only Starling in her autumn and burning colors.

He needs to control, he needs, he needs, and he slams the door of her room against the snowdrift and cries.

He clings to her stability, clutches her close to drive away the howling storm just on the edge of his conscious. He needs to be free of the dragging freezing winter-he needs to be buried in Starling's warmth and longs to lose time again in her arms.

Burying his face into her chest, Lecter runs his tongue along her soft burning flesh until he can taste nothing but her-not the sour tang of tears or the bitterness of screams. And Clarice hangs from his hold, arms useless at her side. She is gripped by this monster of time as defenseless as a babe as she is devoured.

It is when a broken sob ripples across her skin does Starling remember her limbs. Her hands to his head, holding him close, holding as tightly as she herself wished to be so many lonely nights, waking up to the screams of dead innocence. She holds him close and together as present and past seek to rip him apart.

Lecter lifts his head. Clarice can see the shine of tears in the dawn light, the soft stain of red on his lips from where his teeth have torn his own flesh in panic. Starling lifts her face to his and kisses the blood away, ingests the pains and leeches it from him. And he is more than willing to give it up, to give in, to give way to her scorching mouth as her kiss burns away the shakey chilly panic. He wants to be enveloped, he wants to burn now as surely as he will one day.

But still, the savage hunger beats in his chest far above eighty-five, he can hear the roar of it, the rushing blood in his ears. His flesh knows what will stop the need; he is holding her warm and willing in his arms.

Clarice loses her breath when she thrown on the bed, landing on her belly. Combing her dark curtain of hair from her face she sees the dark metal of Johnny's gun peeking from under her pillow, industrial and accusing against her white bedsheets.

When she hears the buckle of his belt and feels the tear of her underwear again, she knows he will show her as much mercy as she did Gumb. Is she willing to make a sacrifice of herself? Let him beat his hurt against her like a wave against the rocky shore, Starling remote and unmoving?

Lecter bends and buries his face into her hair, inhaling her scent, pressing the lingering smell of almonds and pine, earth and nature against his marble white flesh. He turns her over to face him, to see her eyes. His own are black, the pupils blown out with lust and fear. He clears the hair from her face, searching searching searching, as if to memorize her features. And in an instant, Clarice knows she is no lifeless shore to him, no more than he still stone templar to her.

He did not need her body or her compliance. Lecter wanted _her_. None other would do, no other could understand. Clarice opened her mouth to his invading kiss and took him as he came. Because she understood; this was how he could handle his rage.

She cannot be the agent of his demise tonight.

His fingers, still cool from the room, pull the husk of her torn shirt from her body. Pink infuses along the cream of her skin-pink blush on her flesh, blood on white snow…

No-no he would not let history seep in through the cracks of this chamber. His fingers burn as they dip along her belly, finds the burning between the pillars of her thighs. Starling gasps, lungs spasming as if wounded mortally, his touch penetrating and searching. The doctor's hand is seared with heat as her fire pools in his palm.

And Hannibal Lecter did what he has always done when seeking escape from the trap door: he kills her. But Clarice dies only a little death, her body shivering violently before falling lax against the sheets, twitching in her death throes until it is passed, leaving her panting.

More than anything he longs for the sweet silence of death, too.

It's a savage thing, exorcising suffering. A rough but quick birth from pain into pleasure.

In the end, the burning flames have sapped the good doctor of his strength. The roof that is his body slowly collapsing atop his patient confessor, time's temple burned clean from the inside out. She is soft, and small, and alive surviving many deaths tonight, surviving him.

And he does not hear the ax echoing in the halls of his thoughts. Nothing but Clarice's breathing in his ear, a fall breeze across his cheek. Her hand again at his cheek. She lays there, bearing the marks of his battle on her hips, on her neck where his teeth bit with wild abandon, but seeks out his welfare. A thumb brushing his cheek, rubbing at the nearly dry river beds his pain had cut along his face. There is a question in that touch, and he opens his eyes to find it asked again in her gaze. Battle weary, her touch is still gentle.

Starling placed an unbidden kiss of absolution on his lips, on the cracked flesh and blood and sin.

He remembers himself, and his weight, shifting until he is lying beside her. Lecter is not sorry for what he has done, the marks he has left. But he does not wish overt harm to Clarice. His fingers comb back her hair, holding her face. Behind her, just above her damaged ear, his eyes catch the glint of metal; the white shine off the silver handcuffs. They knocked the bedside table in their enthusiasm, the decoy tissue box on its side, the cuffs spilling out, still swaying in the silence.

His gaze drifts to the pillows and sees the gun on her bed, as stark against the sheets as gunpowder on her creamy cheek. He returned to his courageous lover and sees in the moments before sleep steals them both, not an ounce of sorrow in her gaze either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Reference:
> 
> Saturn or Saturn Devouring His Son by Peter Paul Rubens


	6. Chapter 6

** **

Dr. Lecter's pencil hovered over the butcher paper, suspended in thought. He made a mark, hesitated, then struck it out. Adjusting the pencil in his grip, he shifts in his seat, pulling the candle closer. He has been gifted with a silent mind all morning and decided to put it to good use. Now, right before noon, he has lit the candles early, the clouds heavy and dark with the oncoming rain despite the dazzling light that morning.

He has been devoted to his mathematics for hours now, following the beat of the numbers and sums until he felt his breathing even and his thoughts flow with the same rhythm, too devoted for anything else. Back and forth between his old calculations and continuing, following his thoughts and improving, correcting and sometimes starting over again. For hours he bent, weaving the numbers on the loom of his paper, tugging at the strings and theories until they made a pattern more agreeable.

The doctor has felt calm since he woke earlier that morning in Starling's bed. When he moved to fix his clothes he felt light, as if his body was finally done completing some herculean task, akin to the sensation in his arms when he had finally finished hauling the late Capponi curator's body into the basement, muscles relieved to finish their labor.

He had listened to her breathing as he buttoned up his shirt, the sounds of cloth loud when he pulled the blankets up over her shoulder, the creak of her stairs invasive. But every sound had been echoing in the halls of his silent sleeping mind. He might have almost called it peaceful if it were not for the dread ready on the horizon. He could feel a shade of it already, not yet fully waxed, like spying the moon in the midday sky.

Trying to tourniquet the oncoming pain at the source, he had spent almost all his time in calculations. The discarded paper at his elbow was almost piling higher than the sheets left on his pad. A forgotten lunch of tea and scones at the other corner of the desk deathly cold.

He should feel at home now, with the overcast day, no distractions but the scratch of lead on paper. He always preferred rainy days, an excuse to light the fire and candles early to keep him warm. Always seeking warmth. He liked the long shadows that danced in the darkness, like in his memory palace. As if the solid walls of his temporary home would melt away, and he could believe he was wandering his palace in reality; if he could achieve that, his memories would be closer to being real, to physically manifest: a concept he now chases with his paper trails.

But now the darkness was no longer comforting, but distracting. He feels the strain in his eyes acutely as he stares at the numbers and symbols he penned. He feels cold even as a bead of sweat drags down the flesh of his neck. Point three five eight-_no. Six. Six not eight_.

He spins the pencil and rubs out the mistake, goes to correct it, and hesitates again. The numbers swim on the page for a moment, and the doctor swipes away the water from his tired eyes with a knuckle. The dark has not hurt his eyes like this before, or perhaps before recently.

Abandoning the task he drops his pencil and runs his hands through his hair, pressing the heels of his palms against his temples. He has not slicked it back with water, and it lays in thick unruly locks across his forehead as it had been after his lover's finger combing. As he leans back he feels the reopened battle scars on his back. Even with cream, the sting is still there. His body is a ruined temple, and still, he can only feel the echo of despair, only whispers from the dark corridor that leads down to the rotten foundation of the palace.

He is too far away, in the doorway of a much more pleasant chamber, a _safe_ room, with a door that so securely locks out any snow squall that threatens the peace.

So why does he chase the faint voice? Why is he seeking out familiar pain in this newly quiet palace, keeping to the dark when bright autumn light now touches almost every hall and passage of his thoughts?

When reaching for the hope of reversing time, and preventing the oubliette's creation, his fingers brush the satiny warmth of living flesh. His hand cups Starling's cheek in his memory, thumb rubbing her mark on its bone, and feeling the muscles pull into a sated smile.

He lingers with her, listening to the tempo of her breathing, to the notes of her sighs, as one would pause to catch an errant tune outside a church. The quiet melody of their dawn, when weapons and history had been laid to waste. He could explore her milky skin in the daylight, watch the sun play in the honey of her brown hair.

Instead of reversing time, he now asks a smaller boon: for it simply to stand still. To stop altogether, neither progressing nor submitting to atrophy. He wants this with a need so different from the soul aching burn of rectifying his sister's death. With a want that smolders in his chest-the still-living embers from his trial by fire that morning. It is a living thing rather than the cold dread of responsibility.

The doctor leans back in his chair. He wanted her for his own, only his own and for the first time, felt his own selfishness brand him like a traitorous blood-red letter. He wanted this peace, he wanted Starling, he wanted to be back in her bed, he wanted...

Lecter catches sight of himself and his red robe in the yellowed glass of the hall mirror, watches himself as he leans away from the calculations, hands buried in his hair, half becoming half distraught.

"'_I am half sick of shadows,' said the Lady of Shalott_," he recited to his reflection.

Like the shock of a snapped piano wire, Hannibal felt the sentiment slice through him. He _was_ half sick of shadows and memories. Of kicking through the dead leaves of his heart, of living in the limbo between the death of autumn and the onset of winter, never feeling truly warm and never free of the frost of that deadly year.

This palace which had housed and kept him now cloistered him. Walls of experience and plight stood firm like the pillars of a tomb, waiting patiently for its next occupant, whilst he looked out at the world, always watching. Observing, seeing life through a spyglass of an outsider, back to the wall on the edge of the crowds, searching and searching and never finding. But he had tasted sunshine, he had stepped into the world and felt clammy to be back within the safety of his mind and loneliness.

Clarice had burst from her marble confines, from her stationary plinth and wandered free in her room. She was cracking the barriers of her chamber, threatening to break free entirely. To corrade her walls and let the greenery of new life crawl in like ivy on an ancient building; beautifully devouring.

And he wanted her: to breathe in the smell of pine and earth, almonds and fresh air. And he could.

He could return to her, he could have her. She had taken her gun and never pulled it. He had nearly killed her, and she had responded to his bite with a kiss. His strangling touch with caress. She was there, and no walls held him back.

It could not last forever, it was unsustainable like a meteoroid entering the atmosphere. Fast and momentary, lovely in its death, wonderful destruction. Sooner than later they would burn up and fall to earth.

And then he would return home, to his familiar walls, his gallery of time and memory. Then he would have new paintings, and new rooms to keep him should he set things to right: should time reverse and Clarice Starling never be, never suffer and never fall.

He would devote himself to Mischa gladly, keeping one trifle for himself and only him. His one act of pure selfishness.

Standing, he abandoned his tapestry of numbers with its threads of equations all pulled out and undone, the excuse for staving off the reaching hands of duty and responsibilities, delaying them just a little longer.

Just a moment longer, just a few more nights outside of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> I Am Half Sick Of Shadows Said The Lady Of Shalott by John William Waterhouse
> 
> The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson


	7. Completing The Arch

Baths were not a part of Starling's normal routine. Both sides of the duplex had a sizable tub, a feature Mapp had insisted on when they had gone house hunting. But Clarice was a true disciple of the shower; quick and efficient. She had things for those rare times she would slip under the water to treat herself, but they lay on the side of her tub, tucked out of sight behind the curtain like the magazines under her bed.

Now there was a necessity to the indulgence. Her thighs burned, her hips ached terribly and being suspended in the hot water was a balm. The water is milky with her moisturizing oils, the scent of rosemary and violets cloying and suffocating, but the sensation too soothing for Clarice to give it up.

She takes her washcloth and lathers it with soap, propping one heel on the side of the tub. She can see his fingerprints on her calf. It was here he had held her, pushing her legs open and back until her knees were nearly against her ribs, pinning them. Similar marks marred her waist, where hands had anchored whilst their bodies followed savage rhythm.

And Clarice had let him.

She stares up at the blank ceiling of her bathroom, hair curling around her as she soaks. Another reason she dislikes baths: too much time to think. Too much silence for her thoughts to destroy. To remember.

She remembered every terrifying moment, she remembered the wild look in the doctor's red eyes, how the person she had confided in, even respected, had been absent behind those windows, shuttered in panic and fear. And most of all, she remembered welcoming the creature in, accepting him as he poured his rage into her, until he shed his clammy skin, the memories that haunted melting away and leaving the man beside her in the morning light.

This was the most incomprehensible. She decided she would never truly become accustomed to the sight of Lecter anything but composed. So to see him lay beside her, hair tousled, eyes glazed over with passion, swollen lips attempting to form words between long pants…

And then he had seen her gun, and reality registered in the passion inlaid face. Clarice had looked back at him, too exhausted to feign innocence or regret; too pleased to pick up the metal and finish what she had intended. They had fallen asleep, staring at one another-

No. No, not quite. Right before her eyes drifted shut, Clarice remembered his face twisting as if in pain or...or shame. As if he surveyed the plains of his mistakes, and could not bear to look. It had been a flash, a quick twitch of cheek and lips, but Clarice had caught it.

Or was meant to catch it.

Starling sat up from her bath, wincing as she rose. Savagely ripping up the stop, she turned on the showerhead and washed free the sweet-smelling oils and suds from her skin. Remembering her anger, remembering why she had lain in bed for hours with her gun in hand.

Lecter had gotten what so many men tried to bribe and cajole and woo out of her.

She had for so long felt like Penelope, desperately tugging at the threads of her tapestry, trying to buy time and wait for her reckoning, her justice and recognition-_who had ever recognized her?_\- to come while they reached in the windows of her mind, grasping and _demanding_. She had been surrounded by so many demanding hearts, to be more this, more that: more accepting or more genteel, more masculine or more silent. Demanding she expect less, demanding she give more.

But most of all they had demanded her softness, even whilst they attempted to scorch it out of her. Her compassion, and her care. The part of her she had locked away, seeing how it had killed mother, loving her father enough for four children, loving them until her loving heart stopped beating from the weight. A tender gaze that was blind to faults, only seeing pain to soothe it. But their faults were illegal, evil and cruel, and their pain self made by their choices. They wanted her loving devotion, not just her loyalty. They weren't content with such courtly concepts. Slavish devotion or burning hatred were the only extremes men mired in corruption could understand, so numb to anything else were they.

And after all, they didn't really want comfort-they wanted the body and not the heart attached to it.

Yet, Lecter had reached it. His rough, blood-stained hands had smashed right through her armor like-glass and wrapped their killing fingers around her heart with a squeezing hold.

Clinically, Clarice knew terror when she saw it. A psychotic episode, a walking terror, a panic attack...too slippery for her book knowledge to put a name to it. It didn't fit into a mold, but in her chest, Clarice knew the feeling. She knew the feeling of waking up in the dark, her body locked, and fearful. She knew about the terrible soul rendering seconds that lifted her from reality, where she couldn't run or fight or even weep; just lay with her hands over her ears, nails digging into her temples.

When trauma has a person in it's suffocating grip, and they'd do anything to get _out, to get anywhere..._

Clarice shut off the water and as she wiped away the droplets from the mirror, saw herself clearly, thought clearly: _Do anything to escape it, even kill._

Her next breath came out shuddering. Was this what the doctor had wanted, savagely ripping through pretenses and politeness to anyone who stood outside his cell? This sudden moment of clarity, of looking through a person and seeing under all the layers of learned behaviors, history and habits, and finding their mechanism, watching it tick? Of finding the core of another mind, true and clear. The sense of free fall that came with sudden discovery, euphoric and ephemeral but sweet and exhilarating, the exhilaration of _knowing_?

Starling turned inward, and for a brief moment, windows aligned across the rooms of her mind, to show a chamber where a single second was carved, scorched into the wall of her thoughts like a brand. Lecter, in a time where he did not mock. _Thank you, Clarice. Oddly peaceful, almost serene._

Then she was in her bedroom, almost seeing herself as if standing on the side, watching her forgo her gun, reaching out to him unafraid, almost trance-like. Oddly at peace.

Match.

She'd recognized him, whoever or whatever he was. She'd looked at him and recognized him. And the man who for so long Clarice believed the most demanding of all hearts instead was quite the opposite. He asked nothing more than for her to come as she was, to be as she was. _Not your first invention...That was a lie...You are a warrior…_

Starling had given him what so many had sought because she had found that the mechanics that were in him, also belonged to her. Whatever made up Hannibal Lecter at that moment, they were of the same stuff. They shared the same terror, and in that they were no longer alone in the darkness, no longer starving for touch.

Dressed now, in her kitchen with a quickly cooling cup of coffee, Clarice did not have Mapp's skillet to look into, her roommate taking it to her lover's house to cook for the night. Instead, she stared at the blankness of her kitchen wall for a long time, not sitting comfortably. What was she left with?

_Left, left always left in the end. Left to be recycled, left alone in a basement, left without backup, without allies._ Left in a duplex with nothing but to wait for her fate. Left in the morning with nothing but the marks of a touch that proved its existence.

_Who the hell are you?_ A warrior who had survived the beast? Or a fool who thought a rough fuck more than it was? Was it a moment outside of time, where she began to shake with truth, having found someone who was her exact frequency? Or had she been used as surely as she had seven years ago?

Back and forth, her thoughts turning with every tick of her white clock, the bold black hands clawing across its pristine face, time moving now, the frozen moment gone. Swinging from compassionate to loathing, from understanding to scorn balancing on a knife-edge that was sure to cut either way.

Tick. Clarice and Lecter had always shared something frighteningly familiar, it went deeper than she ever thought.

Or.

Tock. Lecter had crawled in at her most vulnerable and stole a great prize, leaving her conquered in the morning.

Tick. His terror was real.

Tock. His episode was an act.

Tick. Tock. He was a man whom she knew better than anyone, he was a preternatural monster who played on her psychology. If it was an act, why had he returned to her when surely he knew he would be caught? If it was true why did he leave her alone, alone again? Tick. Tock.

The ring of her doorbell was jarring, reality ripping through the careful weaving of her mind's loom, slicing through the threads of the uncompleted tapestry and leaving tatters of thoughts.

Swearing under her breath as she took a napkin and blotted at the splashed coffee on her jeans from her start, shuffling her way to the front door. A courier was her visitor, and so starved of even feigned kindness, his bright smile made her blink. She fumbled the pen he gave her and signed her name without really seeing the title of the sender.

Alone again, this time, holding a large white box, tied artfully with a bright silver ribbon. She took it upstairs, wanting privacy to open it without gloves as if her diploma would tattle on her. Clarice would be damned if they got another piece of real evidence from her-let them sit and spin with their fake ads.

Careful with the pretty ribbon, she lifted the box's lid and pulled back the tissue paper. Laid inside was a delicate white robe, silk catching the slight light from the sun as it peaked behind the rain clouds. Beneath it a light violet nightgown trimmed with soft delicate white lace and matching slippers. Deeper still, three sets of undergarments, so soft, her skin practically ached with want, trapped as it was in her poking, ill-fitting mass-produced things.

They were so fine, things that Clarice had only seen on glossy pages, artfully draped on lazing figures, haughty in their leisurely beauty. Her rough fingers caught on the silk as she lifted each article out. Her eyes, so keen in envying the finer things, appraised the stitching and the make and found it surpassed even her guiltiest of splurges. But it was not behind a boutique window. It was here, in her hands, ready to be worn. A most exquisite gift.

_And now, I know who I am._

The thought cut across her like a slash to the throat. Her fingers dropped the fine silky garments. A gift, a payment. Compensation for a service.

_Whore._

She backed away from the bed, the bed and the payment, the word ringing in her ears, so loud even the haunted memory of screams couldn't drown it out. It beat against her brain, shattering the arches she had connected and built in the shower. Her raging bear of self-censure, of guilt, scraping at the walls of her thoughts, finally free from her illusion of deeper understanding. The same creature that woke only to destroy her, and blame her, the same roars of blame that accompanied every death, every kill, every failure.

_Whore whore whore._

People had said it, Krendler's eyes had said it, everyone had secretly wondered if it was true. And it was, it was true. Even Lecter knew it. She was a traitor to her cause, she failed to bring justice, blinded by the tenderness she gave to him-the kind she had always longed for in her own moments of fear and panic. She had let him indulge in her, and let herself indulge. She had been worse than weak.

Clarice Starling was the monster's _whore_.

And she had almost fallen for it. Had almost gladly accepted it, given up her sworn duty, dazzled by the beautiful things, sensations, and pleasures. She was no better than the men that fucked their way through the trainees. No better than her own executioners, holding her career hostage, waiting to bring it to the block.

Weeping so loudly and so long, she did not notice the sun finally disappear beyond the horizon, did not notice the wind and rain begin to beat against her windows competing for volume in the room with her sobs.

And lastly, as she wavered between despondent silence and bitter tears, Clarice did not notice her bedroom door open until her lover stood over her, a flash of lightning revealing his stare before leaving them both together in the darkness again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> Ophelia by John Everett Millais
> 
> Ophelia's Speech:
> 
> "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts...There's fennel for you, and columbines.—There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it "herb of grace" o' Sundays.—Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.—There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say he made a good end."  
Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5
> 
> Rosemary symbolized remembrance, whilst violets symbolize faithfulness and fidelity.
> 
> Penelope and the Suitors by John William Waterhouse


	8. Judith Victorious

Chapter 8

**Judith Victorious**

Dr. Lecter stood in the eye of the storm, the wailing wind beyond the window at his back, the weeping hero at his feet. In a flash of lightning he saw his gift, chosen carefully, and paid for hastily to arrive before he did, on the bed, and the reception was before his eyes. Another flash and he saw Starling, pale as the moon, the trails of her tears glistening like comet tails before the dark consumed again, leaving him with only the twinkle of her watery eyes, the flash of her teeth as her lips parted.

Neither did he move, nor did he resist the stillness that came over him. Lecter likes to look at her, this tragedy in motion, this hero of old glory and honor trapped in the body of a still young woman. He observes her in fascination as one does before a sculpture of the ancients, fragmented and chipped but still standing; the warrior in defeat, in awe of the technique in its creation, and marveled at its survival. But like the pictures of those old gods and warriors, there is nothing but the observation of destruction. There is no temple of achievements built to Starling. No choir of reporters to sing her praises, no prophets of government to assure her future.

Even in her devastation, she is beautiful, her weeping a fight within itself, because her heart was alive enough to feel sorrow, still just whole enough to break. Clarice was still within the thin trembling figure, the tiniest flicker of a flame, broken but not blown out. Still here.

Still rises.

Still comes near.

In flashes of lightning, her movement winking in and out of sight in time. On the floor, standing. Standing-approaching-no transitions in between. Before him, and then on him.

The world upends itself, and Lecter flies backward, his knees hitting the bed, body falling on to it. In the next light, she's above him, no longer the beautiful weeping martyr but a fury: truth and righteousness, crawling from her well, her anger directed solely at him.

Her hands beat against his chest and arms like the rain against her window panes. She's screaming at him, telling him every horrid thing she had ever thought, screaming her plight to his unmoving figure. Every name she had ascribed him, the vile confirmed and the good ones betrayed, dropping monikers on him like flowers at an imperial wedding; smothering and sudden.

Clarice is only beginning, growing in intensity as she goes on, broken free from the restraints that had bound her. The manners, the impossible standards, the sense of what kind of person she ought to be. All the walls have been blown apart by the storm of her anger. She screams to be heard, over the storm, over his assertions and heavy quiet gaze, over the years and over the piled ruin that is her life, like a survivor trapped under the rubble of a destroyed temple; crying out to be noticed, seen, recognized. To be rescued.

Lecter finally remembers himself and struggles at last. He grabs at her arms and wrists, trying to take her, hold her. She is fiery anger, and he fears she may harm herself in the burning. Starling, wild and strong, screams for him to let her go, don't touch her, calling him names, shooting arrows that would have hit true had he not been numb with surprise and concern.

He has her arms pinned to her side, holding as she writhes and kicks and screams but cannot get loose from his restraints. So she bites, teeth baring down down down until she can taste the first hint of blood. Then she is free to shove Lecter back onto the bed.

He's quick, the flash of the knife bright in the lightening as it appears in one hand, the other clutching his face. But this is Starling's turf, and Lecter is behind enemy lines. Despite his visits, she knows her room better in the dark and is quick to the beside. Johnny's gun in her hand, its muzzle against the underside of his chin in an instant, pushing him back against the bed again, her other hand fisted in his shirt, pinning him. And all is still after one final cry of thunder.

For a moment that lasted the span of a gasp, Lecter closed his eyes. Here was peace after one last sudden flash of brightness. Here was an end to it, the ultimate silence, weightless and quick. A blink and he was done; a squeeze, and he would have crossed the river and set foot onto Zion, his burden gone. No choice to make, no clock to stop for a few moments of selfish want.

Better this way. Better that they die by each other. There is no shame here, nothing but two warriors coming together in one final battle. Better she die, and Mischa live. Or he go and Clarice return as Judith victorious with the head of the wicked noble as her prize to shame her cowardly tribe. Or perhaps best of all, they both end and there is no fear of the after-for what _can_ come after once you have all you desire?

But the second passes and his knife is pressing against her throat, the skin indenting but not yet splitting atop the wicked blade. But Starling is unafraid, presses into it as she growls in no uncertain terms that she is _no whore_.

The words freeze him, and he is overcome with the sudden relief of understanding, like opening a pressure valve, pain blossomed into relief. A gift of apology to replace what he had presumptuously ruined was taken as payment and enticement. Years of guilt twisting a safe room for him into a torture chamber for her. The harpy felt heavy in his fingers as it slipped and fell onto the bed. He reached through the bars of her plight and hair hanging over her rage twisted face, her servitude and dungeon trials, to touch her cheek.

Starling does not knock him away, as Lecter had done to her. She does not lash out like a trapped animal, twisting and pulling against the rope. He sees the touch crack her marble resolve, sees the chips fall as her check flinches, then her lips turn down, eyes screwing to keep back a fresh wave of tears.

But Clarice did not pull the trigger. So his fingers roamed over her face, thumb pressing into the supple flesh, and scraping the tears from her cheek. Lecter felt the metal of her pistol dig a little less firmly, and began to sit up.

Starling did not drop the weapon right away. She wanted to hold onto her rage, her constant friend and stabilizer. Rage she knew, rage was familiar. Comfort was a strange and frightening new world. Starling shouldn't want it, and not from the monster. But when had _should_ ever wiped her tears? When had obedience pulled her into its arms? When was the last time a hand pressed her head against a still-beating heart?

Any heart that had beat for Clarice had long been silenced by the law she served.

Lecter tucked her head under his chin, holding her face against his chest. He felt the slow and sure dampness there grow wetter and larger, felt the thump of her gun hitting the mattress. When her breathing turned to shuddering gasps, he adjusted his hold to lower his wicked mouth to her ear. The doctor bid her stop, and requested she breathe. Told her again the truth she seemed so likely to forget; no whore lay here, but a warrior. And in this battle of will, he had certainly become her spoil of war.

Tilting her face up, lowering his, he lapped at her freshly spilled sorrow, drinking in the tears. Sniffling, her righteous rage suddenly reduced to rubble by a touch, Clarice had a thought: Lecter ate what he disdained, what he thought was beneath him. He cannibalized her tears because they were not worth even the effort it took to produce them.

The licks on her cheek turned to brushes of lips. The brushes turned to pressure and his lips traveled over the planes of her face. His mouth was warm and soft over hers, neither demanding nor desperate. Now both were in total control of their facilities, both leaned into the kiss, like magnets slowly creeping closer only to jump the final distance to join.

Starling ran her hands through his thick hair, holding him in their kiss, now having the time to enjoy how silky the strands felt gripped in her fingers. It was _her_ tongue that swiped against his lips, _her _invasion into Lecter's mouth.

He was a spoil, was he? Then there was nothing left but the claiming. The creature that had lain beside her and drank deeply from her hidden well of compassion would be drained now. It was his turn to give, and for Starling to take-to forgo the request, the asking permission.

And Hannibal was glad of the stealing.

A fire of a different kind grew in Clarice, no longer in the head but deep in the belly. It clawed and raked through her body, warming her more successfully than rage ever had. And she pulled this man who loathed the cold in with her.

Her fingers pulled at the jacket, tugging it off his shoulders. It would have been an easier job had she looked at where her hands landed, but her mouth was too busy finding his. At first too low, and then slanted perfectly across his parted lips. He struggled and tugged against her, chest pressing into hers sweetly as he, too, tried to free his arms. Finally gone, she pushed it off the bed, her gun and his blade with it.

Lecter caught the pistol, his knife clattering to the floor. He was too quick for her panic to begin. A flick of the thumb and the magazine fell into his palm, then he pulled back the slide and dumped the bullet in the chamber onto the floor, the now harmless parts following with a careful toss onto his discarded clothes. Then his nimble fingers worked under her shirt at dismantling her bra clasp.

Not wanting the distraction, Starling ripped off the clothes and tossed them aside, but deflected his caressing hands, knocking them aside in favor of tugging off his sweater. He was pale, pale as snow, the blood flushed along his throat, dark colorless patches in the dark. But his eyes-no matter how deep the night she could always find his eyes, bright and fixed on her.

Lecter was everything forbidden and dangerous and male. Her fingers trailed over every inch of him that she had been fascinated by before. Those unbidden secret thoughts that crept up on her in the dark theater of her mind, whispering questions in her ear as she watched the actors of her memory dance before her. How would the line of his jaw, strong and defined feel to her touch? How her eyes caught the definition of his collar and where it led-and she followed those trails now, like a girl of lore wandering off her innocent path into a den to be devoured.

She had survived his killing mouth before.

Like tracing a sentence in a book better to read it, she followed the lines nature used to make him, reading this new knowledge of the man who had come to represent so much. Mentor and tormentor, comfort and demon, hatred and friend.

Lover.

Down over his chest, the flesh jumping to her touch. She felt his shuddering breath and the rapid pounding of his heart-racing. She made his heart beat unlike any violence could. Her touch paused at his belt, tugging the leather free from the golden buckle. Lecter regained use of his hands, burying them in her hair, leading her lips to his so that when her hands dipped and found what they sought, his cry was silenced on her tongue. Starling continued to explore, explore her power and his pleasure until one violent buck almost upended her seat.

Lecter caught her waist just before she plummeted, not letting her fall.

Wisely they shuffled back onto the bed, the doctor divesting himself of his trousers, and placing biting kisses across Clarice's shoulders as she peeled off her own jeans. He lay back against her pillows, offered a helping hand when she reclaimed her place above him.

Without the thick protection of clothes, Clarice felt him real and warm beneath. Searing hot and panting, still so novel to see him anything but serene. Had they once called _her_ cold? Cold fish, remote. But the name never felt right for all they tried to engrave it on her. She was too full of fire, full of purpose. No, here was a man remote: cold and hard like stone-and only she had cracked through the tomb of his reserve and felt the heat of fire underneath-in her mind and now under her body. Just beneath the crust of his guard, he was liquid stone and fire only for her.

At the thought, her fingers laced with his squeeze. He squeezed back, eyes half-lidded as she adjusted her posture. Starling moves with him as he rises and falls, seeking and needing and _wanting_. Slow languid movements, like waves lapping against the shore, or the rain still beating it's heady rhythm against her window. Flesh sliding along flesh, feeding the hunger: skin hunger. Clarice had been starved of it, so empty of touch that she had been reduced to tears in her own kitchen not but a few days before, bloated on the loneliness. Now she freed her hands and gorged. Satiating that hunger with every stroke of fingers, every press of her mouth.

And recognizing that secret desire, the vulnerable want of comfort that she had thought so weak, he cupped her face and held it. For every bite, he returned a kiss. He sat up, and held her, arms tight about her as she carefully joined them-the sensation stealing her breath and making her strong runner's legs tremble. Lecter's embrace was an anchor as she began to move and find her own rhythm, no longer supine and accepting, but taking what was hers. Who was hers.

An arm around his neck, a hand braced on his leg behind her, Starling arching into him her hair spilling over Lecter's arm, letting herself indulge and enjoy without inhibition, without the doubt that was not natural to her mind, the infectious disease. Clarice took her spoil even as his free hand caressed the very scars that declared her earnings. Every battle she had survived, every failed attempt to martyr her that had hurt with the making, and now shivered with pleasure at his reminding touch.

Again, she found his eyes in the dark, no matter the gloom, always finding the light to absorb. Clear now, without the cloud of need-need to satiate or need to escape. Present, burning with nothing but real, true desire and looking at her-seeing he for who she was. _Who the hell was she to him?_

"_Clarice_."

One whisper and the spell wonderfully, blissfully shattered. Starling cried out his name in return, her nails digging into whatever flesh she could find to hold-the back of his neck, the arm that held her-to anchor her as she drifted, buoyed on waves of delight. Lecter did not seem to mind the pain as he held onto her shaking form. Nor did he seem to mind that she had whimpered his title rather than his Christian name.

She returned to her body in degrees, slumping forward, the warrior in repose, arms and head laid out against him like a maiden under an enchantment. Still, he held her. Strange that she should need comfort from such an act, this time lovely and fully felt. But the more he gave, the more she found she needed it. Her arms found their strength again, wrapping around his shoulders, holding onto him as Lecter turned, laying her back against her bed, her ankles locked at the small of his back.

She watched him without really seeing, her fingers breaking from their hold to follow the alien contours of his new face. Starling felt a pang for the memory, a longing for the familiar paths of cheeks and nose under all the new work, like one yearns for the allies and streets of home. She found it again, however, in every gaze locked. The doctor's forehead rested against hers and he spoke-but Starling couldn't make it out. It was in a language as foreign to her as safety.

With a shiver, a small noise in the back of his throat, and sudden collapse, Lecter followed her into lethargy. She did not yet have the energy to care about his full weight pressing her into the mattress. Instead, Clarice mused; was it that they were both such connoisseurs of death that their pleasure so much resembled it? A shiver, a whimper, and then sudden stillness. She had held men in such throes before, held them close as they died, slid away from her, always away.

She closed her eyes, a small smile stretching her lips. No, not this man. He moved closer, his heart still beating a tattoo against her breast, still alive, still holding onto her. The doctor stirred, lifting his head to look her over. Perhaps he was assessing if she was hurt, if she would weep again, or if she was ready to resume their fight. It had begun as all their time had begun since the dungeon: with need. Need for information, need to confess, for closeness, for peace. But it had not ended so. He believed she had responded out of pleasure, out of want. He believed he had seen her free. He searched again for tears.

Instead, he found quite a different sight. Clarice smiling at him, eyes hazy and satisfied, so pale against her pools of dark hair. The storm had passed, and the weak moonlight filtered into the room, catching on her teeth and eyes, making a constellation of her contentment. He kissed her grin once, twice, until his own lips began to smirk. _They all called him a vampire._

His kisses slowed, lingered over her mouth. If these moments were indeed stolen, he would take all he could get. He would be selfish, and gluttonous and lustful. These, at least, would be the least of his sins. And Clarice seemed a willing Virgil, following his descent again into the heat.

They were good together. There was no more artful or simple way of stating it. Stripped of their violent desires, their deep-rooted and panicked needs, all the reasons that had brought them together before, they were still simply good together. Clarice felt no whorish use, only her lover's skillful warm hands heating her starved skin, again and again, protecting it from the lonely cold. She did not have to bring him her compassion, her understanding, and loneliness like an acolyte to the altar of a vengeful god. She only brought her want, she only brought her honesty. Clarice only gave him herself. And that was all he wanted.

Just for another moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> Ode to Psyche by John Keats:
> 
> "O latest born and loveliest vision far/Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!/Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star...No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat/Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming."
> 
> Truth Coming Out of Her Well by Jean-Léon Gérôme
> 
> The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma Tadema (Do not ask me why I reference this in almost everything I write I don't know why)
> 
> Judith and Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi


	9. The Eleventh Hour

**Chapter 9**

**The Eleventh Hour**

Hannibal Lecter propped his chin on his hands atop the steering wheel, waiting. He would not move his Jaguar until the Sardinians finally left. Currently, they buzzed around his large pick-up, hefting the tree in the back to search under it, throwing out the manual and papers from the glove compartment onto the forest floor. Lecter and his jet black car were tucked under the low branches, deep in the shadows of the park. Without a master holding their leash, the kidnappers were like a pack of wild dogs, roaming after his scent but chaotic and easy to provoke. It had taken very little to gather them all and lead them to the park and his decoy car.

He would not miss the look or feel of the truck, but it was a reliable vehicle and made him practically invisible in Virginia. It would be a loss, but better than his own head-or whatever appendage they might choose as a trophy, should they get the chance. Lecter had cleaned it out of any real evidence of his residence, instead tucking in a few papers from New York, including a stolen room key from the hotel he had patronized whilst visiting. That would keep them busy, and my, did he want them busy.

Focused and paid, they had been dangerous. Loose and hateful, they were just as lethal, but not as interesting, like tools that had lost their novelty. The chase had been white-hot before, and the doctor had been careful, dreadfully so. But now...now they were an annoyance. A distraction, and a chore. Boring.

He had much better things to occupy him, and on stolen time; none of which he planned to use scampering about the state evading their pig-eyed gazes.

Whoso list to hunt him was a fool. He had already been tagged by a creature more deadly; he pressed a finger to the skin around his neck where red marks that declared _for Clarice am I _lay_._

It has not been long since he left her bed, not long since they slept, more exhaustion than actual dreamy slumber. Awake and aware, and now with free welcomed access to her figure, Hannibal had explored at leisure. They were like the tide, receding into lazy touches, slow movements before another wave of activity overtook them building up like a cresting wave and crashing into bliss.

Dr. Lecter inhales the scent of the forest through the crack of the window, but only smells her pine shampoo. He feels her hair against his cheek, her shoulder under his lips, even her strong runner's legs around his hips again. Lecter hears her, soft and sweet in his ear.

He is not prone to the trite desire to make a woman overly vocal, but the small whimpers and squeaks that had escaped her bit lip were as soothing to him as cricket song in summer.

They were unlike her, and Clarice had tried to stifle them against his mouth and chest and pillows. Perhaps she was embarrassed. No doubt many lovers had taken her honest sounds and created a symphony to their pride-used her like an instrument in their selfish orchestra, demanding her song without earning its tune.

Yet by the time the sun rose, both intruder and time clock, she was freely expressing her delight. It made him smile, not with pride, but a mirror of her emotions. Her joy was rare to see, rarer than her weakness and tears. And now, the sight of them both belonged to him alone.

He sighed, over indulging selfishly in memory. The last time they had made love with exhausted lethargy, Hannibal propped on his arms to better see her face in sweet pleasure. Her own were lazily wrapped around his neck, fingers combing through his hair, twining it around her fingers as she smiled at him…

He shifted in his seat, now bored _and_ uncomfortable. That was how the day had gone, vacillating between awful boredom and the discomfort of rushing about, setting up a false scene in the forest to send his would-be hunters away. Far out of state and mind, and leaving him to submerge in this new experience.

He checked his watch, but then spied one of the men-Carlo?-looking under the truck for any rigging that might set the vehicle a flame when they started it. Lecter's fingers tapped against the leather of the wheel. In his chest, a coil of impatience began to twist. He wanted to leave. He wanted to be out of the cold, away from these people that reeked of pigs and sweat and death, and away from the hunt.

Away from the frigid cold that crawled over his flesh, piercing inside to his very veins. Lecter does not like winter, and it's dead colors and dead air, stale with no scents to sample. Nothing to distract from the cold emptiness of memory, from sinking back into another frigid lonely place where only the clouds of his own breath in the air and the corpses of children kept him company, and high dark walls blocked out the sunlight while he waited waited waited, empty-hearted, empty armed, and hollow without his sister.

Lecter swallows and focuses on the shine of the pick-up truck, the warm spots created by the yellow floodlight the kidnappers had brought along. He focused and carefully picked his way backwards, away from the trap door that emitted cold and the stench of a stool pit. The doctor tilts his face to the side towards his car's window and inhales. The forest, greenery, and dirt-and time stopped waiting for new life.

Hannibal wanted to leave, leave this tedious spectacle, leave the cold, leave his car which now seemed far too small for him. He wanted to go back to Clarice, go…

The word echoed in his mind like a forgotten clock in a distant room. Hannibal had been so long without a place-a nomad who laid his head on a pillow, in a bed, in a house but never a home.

Home had seemed a childish concept, tucked away with parental need and comfort when manhood settled over his person. Self-dependency replaced security, shelter more important than belonging. But now he had a place, made for him, and it was not a side of a bed or room in a dresser. His place was a woman with long shining hair, bright eyes, and sweet-smelling flesh.

And when he was done with his selfishness, collecting memories to sustain him the rest of his life, his place would _still _be with her, or at least her occupancy in the universe.

Her place, her purpose-_his_ purpose. His duty, and responsibility. The coil in his chest tightened, it needed release. Eyes snapping open, he counted the men swarming his abandoned car. No, too many. He couldn't take them, and he did not have his crossbow. There would be no snap of relief, no sudden silence, and peace for him here in this forest, unknown and yet achingly familiar. No, he would need to ease this anxiety another way. A better way.

It took three hours for them to finally depart. By then Lecter was tired, nearly perspiring with the effort to remain focused and not let the cold seep into him and turn back time. He drove to Clarice's duplex purely by memory, exhausted from the effort to remain present and focused on the mechanics of driving, like regulating breathing to avoid vomiting.

Stepping into her kitchen, he inhaled the tacky but safe scent of lemon Lysol and generic store-brand hand soap. The forest however lingered on his person. He shucked off his hat and gloves, placing them on the table. A little calmer he noted Miss Mapp's car absent from the driveway. His own Jaguar was parked two blocks over.

Up the stairs, to the left and at the door of her bedroom. Now the scent of jasmine, lilies, and musk, and the soft inconsistent glow peeking out from under the door. She had lit a candle. Within, Clarice, peacefully asleep, the blankets tucked up around her chin. Even she was escaping the cold, having finally swapped her summer comforter for a thick blanket and spare quilt.

He does not go to her yet. He wants to eliminate the scent of dirt and sweat and fear from his flesh and has no desire to leave the smell on her sheets all night. Carefully lifting the candle from her dresser, cupping a hand around the flame, he moves to her bathroom, not wanting to turn on the cold white overhead light. Folding his clothes carefully on her hamper lid, he steps into the shower and turns the water on as hot as it will go.

Soon the room is humid, almost unbearable, but has vanquished any chill.

Alone in the dark, Clarice Starling opens her eyes. The soft glow from her now emanates from her bathroom, and she can see the steam pour out. Waiting until the water stops, Clarice finally slips out of bed. The silk of her nightgown unfurls to her ankles, a breath of fabric over her legs. It felt luxurious, it looked just as fine. And happily was not too wrinkled from their struggle the night before. As a replacement for her ratty old FBI t-shirt and cotton panties, it would more than do.

She reached into the closet and pulled out two extra pillows. A second of hesitation as she looked at her bed-_preparation, concubine ready for her lord and master, next customer please_-and pushed away the nagging thoughts. Too long had she shackled her private dealings to the thoughts of the public. Too long had the FBI been a cold and abusive bedmate.

She had resumed her debate that morning over the clothing Lecter had gifted her, albeit with much less ire. Possibly due to her exhaustion but more to do with the barren nature of her home. No photos on the wall from memories gilt in golden sunlight and friends, no messages on her machine from concerned voices, employers, or fellow agents. Every time the sickly feeling of use crawled over her, and the faint whisper of _whore _tickled her ear, she would look at these things, these empty places where comfort ought to have lived.

The body could not live without water, and the soul could not survive neglect. Starling had decided, watching as Mapp waved and drove off to start her two week visit home, that if she would not be _given _the tools to survive, she would _take _them. Ardelia fled to the comfort and base of her soul's survival. To a place where pride and empathy dwelt for her. She would rest there, and fill up her canteen of affection to last her the months she would work in the sterile federal desert of the FBI, sipping carefully of the knowledge that she had a safe shelter of love, with a place designed for her.

And Starling had not found such a place for herself in Jack Crawford, or the killing of evil, or even the tedium of the agency. She had found it in this bed. She had found it in Memphis and in Baltimore. Clarice had been led to still waters again and again and like a stubborn child, refused to drink from his spirit's well, starving her soul.

She would not return to the desert thirsty again.

That was how Lecter found her, making a place for him in her bed. She paused, taking in the sight of him, the candlelight illuminating the points of his face the rest of him cast in shadow. For a second Clarice mourned the features that were familiar to her again but found the tableau .of him, freshly cleaned and clad only in a towel comfortingly domestic. Natural.

Clarice came to him and took the candle from his hold, returning it to the dresser, feeling his eyes roam over her body. Lecter's fingers on her shoulder sent a shock down her arm. It was still a novelty to her, human touch. He turned her to face him, fingers tucking back her hair behind her ears, sliding the locks off her shoulders. He gently ran his fingers under the straps of her gown, knuckles grazing her collarbone as he felt the craftsmanship of the lace. Red eyes dancing, reflecting the fire behind her as he appraised the sleepwear, lingering on the Venetian lace that cupped her breasts, ending in an empire waist with the long swath of silk hanging freely, only hinting at the curves of her hips beneath where it began to cling.

Fingers sliding over flesh, over lace, and then his large warm hands covered her chest, gently feeling the pliant flesh beneath cloth. Her hands came up to cover his instinctively, to follow the veins and the bone beneath his skin. At her soft stutter of breath, his eyes found hers again. As Lecter's head lowered, Clarice's heart hammered in her chest. How odd, that for all these times, she still felt that same rush of exhilaration, the sensation of falling, from something as simple as a kiss?

Every encounter had begun with purpose, but now there was only the draw of attraction, the pull of want as her lips met his in a soft brush. She felt his lashes brush her cheek as he pressed on, kissing her again and lingering, melting from one kiss to the next. Her body tingled with excitement, like charged static waiting for release. Under her fingers his thumbs began to brush and caress, following the lace around to her back, drawing her close until she was pressed against him, belly to belly.

Lecter slid the straps of the gown off her shoulders, but as he moved away to let the gown slide off to the ground, he swayed. Starling took his arms, steadying him, and peered up into his face. She looked passed the angles of his cheek and line of the jaw, now registered the lines around his mouth, the purple under his eyes. Whilst she had slept off his ador, he had risen every day and left her in the morning, escaping the light and law.

Clarice shrugged the straps back on and took his fingers from her back. Leading him to the bed, she took his towel and made him sit on the edge. Carefully, she rubbed his hair free of water. It was still thick and dark, and without product or moisture, fell unruly over his ears and forehead. Starling wanted to lean back, to drink in the rare sight of the doctor uncomposed, freshly washed, and totally stripped of clothing and reserve. But as she moved, he caught her waist. His cheek pressed against the soft plane of her belly, and Lecter held her there, inhaling the scent of pine and the lavender dryer sheets she used on her bedding.

He seemed content to stay that way. Starling placed her hands on his head, losing her fingers in his hair. He was too weary to fight, too tired to escape if she still wished him harm, but still returned to her. _Some of our stars_… Starling posed the same danger to the doctor as Lecter did to her. And still, he came back to her as readily as she accepted. Was it too far-fetched to think that he too was a thirsty soul? Perhaps her well was not so dry as she thought.

Clarice was no longer a young cub. She had seen too much and knew too much. This would not last, this peace they found in one another. This quiet and silence that reigned between them. It was a shelter from the storm, propped up against the chilly, killing winds of change and climax. Starling felt it instinctually that even as they lingered here, quiet and comfortable, that outside the world was turning, leading up to something, to the end of all the ambitions and efforts of men who attempted to use them like pieces on a board. The game would end eventually, the clock striking twelve.

For now, however, Clarice would enjoy her eleventh hour, may it give her some comfort when it was all over.

Carefully disentangling herself, Starling pushed him back against the pillows, rounding the bed to her side. As she slid under the covers once more, she saw Lecter lift his pillow and peer underneath. Wellspring she might be, but even exhausted, he was keen enough to check for snakes. Starling lifted her pillow as well, and the tissue box for good measure.

When he settled down, his hands found her again, sliding her across the mattress until she was against him once more. Clarice hid her cold nose in the crook of his neck and felt the sting of tears. Her skin hunger was sated, she had something to hold and someone to hold her. And as the candle's flame died, she wished,-wished harder than she had in her orphan bed so many years ago.

Starling wished with all her might that whatever happened, his warm body solid against her would not become as cold as marble in death as so many of her men had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> Whoso List to Hunt by Sir Thomas Wyatt
> 
> "There is written, her fair neck round about:  
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am"
> 
> There's also an Evanescence quote if you can find it.


	10. The Arrest of Clarice Starling

Clarice Starling was not used to sharing a bed.

As a child, she had been the eldest, but also the only daughter for a very long time. The two brothers that followed her shared a bed before their father had traded some good whiskey he'd won at a church lottery to the local carpenter for several sturdy planks of wood and made them a bunk bed. By that time Clarice was too old to be sharing a room with a boy, so her mother had ripped out the shelves of the storage room with the small window, and made a decent space for her eldest. When Clarice's little sister came, she had a mattress in their parents' room. Clarice had often wondered if her sister had taken up her little window room when she went away, or if Mommy had died too soon for any adjusting to happen at all.

From there Clarice had a brief encounter with privacy at her cousin's, but the duration was so short it barely earned a thought.

The orphanage was at least well funded enough that Clarice wasn't forced to share even a bunk bed. But her thin mattress and hand me down blanket was nothing to boast about, nor where the lumps under said mattress-her few possessions she kept there to safeguard from thievery.

In college, she had been too focused to consider shacking up with anyone, and when ever she did find the time to have her disastrous forays into romance, she was careful. It was a real mood killer that did not lend itself well to relaxing into slumber: up, washed, and out she was before the sun rose. It was a pattern that would follow her all her life, until her near celibacy three years or so after killing Jame Gumb.

Tthose years where the first cracks in her faith appeared; cracks she had easily filled with the gold of hope that if she survived this grunt work she would be rewarded. Her kintsugi never amounted to anything, except making her faith more priceless, and impossible to obtain. An antique of a simple, more ignorant time.

So it came to it that Clarice never really learned to actually _sleep_ with anyone. And here she lay, with a man that was more things to her than simply a body or a lover.

Lecter and she had fallen asleep almost instantly, and though it was deep, her ignorance of sharing a bed woke her often. Mostly it was to simply find a cool spot on the mattress, or to poke her toes out into the chilly air, bringing in a little relief from the warm cocoon their bodies and the blankets made. One time Clarice awoke to find her head pillowed on nothing but the doctor's arm. They had somehow become catty-cornered on the bed, the pillows askew.

She had heard more than enough of men joking about their dead arms from where their wife's head claimed a pillow. Sleepily, barely registering that it was still dark, she folded his arm against his chest and pulled a pillow down. The doctor woke slightly, but only enough to adjust with her on the mattress, turning over his own pillow. When she settled on her belly, his warm hand found rest against her spine. He hadn't been awake enough to even open his eyes.

The next time she woke, the room had only lightened a few hues, from midnight indigo to a dark azure, the sun merely an idea outside her window. Her cheek was pressed firmly to the doctor's back, her arm wrapped around him, fingers against his collar. The heat radiating from his bare skin had become clammy against her face, and carefully she freed her arm and checked to see if he was disturbed.

The doctor continued to sleep like the dead, and Clarice actually stared hard for a few moments until his chest rose and fell enough to satisfy her. He had ended up with one arm dangling off the mattress the other curled, his hand tucked under his chin. She figured he must be a restless sleeper for them to turn so many times in the night, before rolling over and letting sleep claim her one last time.

Finally, when the usual traffic of work travel roused her, Clarice found herself engulfed. She had the blankets tucked under her chin but beneath, Lecter's arm was firmly wrapped around her, snug under her breasts, his hand somehow tucked between her ribs and the bed. His other arm had snaked under her pillow as well and their legs were entangled.

As her mind blearily wandered, not yet truly awake, she wondered if the man ever really slept. Being on the run, she assumed would not make for deep slumber. He, however, was more clever than quick, preferring to build a place than constantly trot the globe. A quick realization, like the glare off a passing car-she had almost caught him, she knew without a doubt one of his identities-and gone without further consideration. Not when she was, frankly, so cozy in his embrace.

Had he really not rested when he had left her side? For three days? No wonder he was out like a light. Did he not have a home to go to? She was sure he must have some kind of accommodations. After all, he was clean and put together whenever she had seen him. And he still returned...

In this large vastly more interesting world, where he could go anywhere, be anyone, he had come here. For comfort, for peace, for vulnerability (for he was oh so vulnerable now). And she-she no longer felt the press of her white blank walls staring at her like a prison for the insane, the forgotten and wasted. _When was the last time you dreamed…?_

Lecter sighed in his sleep, his leg pushing further between hers. Then Clarice felt his body come awake all at once, locking in position and he realized where he was, who he was with, and that it was a bright morning. Clarice turned her face towards his, his bangs brushing her cheek. She wanted to ask if Cupid was afraid to be seen by the light of day, but couldn't bring herself to break the comfortable silence.

The doctor finally opened his eyes. The sight before him stopped his breath, and they both heard when he took his next.

He'd seen her run in the forest, the sun combing gold through her brown locks, making her wide bright eyes dazzle. It had been a powerful image that had run straight through his defenses and into his memory until the specter of her in the sun and trees was almost free of her room in the palace. That Clarice was power and command kissed by the sun. Powerful, but apart, almost sanctified. Demanding of worship.

But here, the dawn was a gentler twin, diffusing her hard lines, making her pale skin almost glow. _Aurora._ And she was looking at him so calmly as if it were the most natural thing in the world to lay beside him, and have his bloody hands rest on her clean flesh. Warm autumn colors; the cream of her skin, the chocolate of her hair mixed with honey strands that reflected as flecks in her sleepy eyes, all against the alabaster sheets tucked around her.

Soft, dreamy, and-_Mine_. There was no echo in his palace, the word was not carried by the wind of his thoughts. It was more of a slamming door, shutting out the future for just a moment. _This is mine. This Clarice belongs to me._

No thoughts of later, when she would be just a memory in his palace. No chilly reminder of the tithe he was willing (and he was...willing) to pay. Only the flush of possessiveness. Here, in this moment, this vision of her, like her pleasure, her laughter, and other delicate facets of herself she kept hidden like artifacts under glass, for the moment belonged only to him.

Given, not stolen. The distinction was extremely important to him at that moment.

Pulling his hand free, brushing his knuckles against her jaw until his hand cupped her face, holding it still. Lips brushed softly, as careful and as curious of her allowance as they were the night before.

Starling reached out to touch his face, and the doctor tasted her grin when her nails scratched the stubble she found there. It was the last crack in the remote armor that had once coated him, the facade of otherness that made him nearly inhuman had kept him safely at a distance from her heart. One cannot care for a myth, a boogeyman, and a tale of horror. But that facade had rotted and the black paint of villainous monikers peeled away, scorched by the fire of their passions and crumbled like ash.

She could care for a man beneath it all.

Now they were simply lovers, sharing a morning kiss that bled grins and was infected with soft breathy laughter as he buried his rough face into her throat. Starling writhed lazily in his arms until he had her gently pinned on her belly, his weight warm and welcome on her back. _So this is intimacy_, she mused. Her hand was still combing through Lecter's hair as he kissed a path down her spine until she could reach no more. The simplicity of being, the abject abandonment of pride, the shunning of shame.

Is this what they wanted, those girls Clarice had eyed with pity and some little envy, who had left school, work, and internships to become wives? It had seemed such a dismally pathetic exchange-trapped in a house, sex, and boring stability for your self-esteem and productivity. To make nothing of yourself, to be worthless, and make be merely an extension of a man. She had given lip service to the power of choice, all the while it seemed to her a type of prostitution.

She had been trained, like so many females in the office, to raise a brow at the women who dropped their careers halfway for hearth and home. Many a time a woman's laziness had been attributed to using the job until she finished, or indeed for the purpose of, finding a husband. Just like long hair, nails, or the fleck of mascara, such joyful events such as weddings, pregnancies or births had the bitter aftertaste of judgment.

But what had she produced for all her work, great judge that she was? What was she worth to the men she was selling herself for? And Clarice _had_ sold herself, body and mind. Perhaps not for sex, but for life; how often had she stepped in front of a comrade and almost taken the bullet? How many times had she insisted on going in, more sure of her skills than her companions? And how many of those times where planned solely on anticipating her actions, _hoping_ she would take the chance?

Starling had sold the husband and children she could have had, that had never seemed worth it. Even when Johnny was asking her as they sat at dinner, already launching into his prepared speech of why it just made sense, why should they be alone when they had each other, why couldn't it be more than familial love-why couldn't that type of love be enough?-it hadn't seemed worth it. To lose herself in another person hadn't been worth her goal.

Was her prostitution any better, to lose herself in an institution without even the benefit of a warm bed at night? Starling did not feel so superior now when her customers, bound by no life long oath, left her after taking all they wanted. It was only by Lecter's intervention that they had not used her as a shield one last time to protect lesser men.

If this simple pleasure of rest and becoming truly rested, of being herself with another and truly feeling present instead of half alive, having to act the rest, was what they left that grey fortress with its files full of hell for, Clarice could not find it in herself to judge those women now. That hard pit for scorn she threw at their glasshouses that rested in her chest now fell to shatter her own foundations.

_Simplicity...Is this my nature? I like this_, her thoughts sighed. _I don't want to lose it…_

Tears might have sprung up if not for her stomach making it's wants known.

The lips by her ear twitched in a smirk and Lecter rolled off her, settling onto his back. Starling sat up and watched as he stretched, almost too long for her bed, and settled back onto 'his' side. In the bright morning light, she could see some of her old bite marks on his shoulders healing rather nicely. Clarice sat up to reach out to trace one.

Lecter responded by patting her belly and giving her a gentle push. He was silently telling her to go, eat something. For all their connection had relied on nothing but words, they had barely spoken a syllable-not at all if you discounted her nearly hysterical rantings or his cries in a language she didn't understand.

Leaving the bed for the sanctuary of the bathroom, Clarice did not even glance at the mirror as she stripped off the nightgown, and stepped into the shower. Avoiding her hair as best as she could, she washed up and realized her towel was gone-draped over the vanity by the bed. There was no need for modesty before him now, as he had seen everything without judgment-and the fact that when she stepped out he was, indeed, asleep again.

Drying quickly, she rummaged through the gift box and pulled on the puffed silk shorts and camisole, covering it with the cream robe that was so smooth, it felt almost wet to the touch. Fingering the embroidery on the ends of the robe's sash, she watched the doctor for a few more minutes, feeling the weight of his trust hang on her. Looking him over with an agent's eye, she gazed at the pale vulnerability of his throat, stretched and waiting as he leaned his head back against one arm.

She saw a version of herself, still bitter and angry, take his knife and slash it across that throat, then it faded and the image of his brains, soft and still wet with fresh blood, slowly dripping off her headboard took its place; crimson and garish to match the entrance wound that kissed his forehead. These tableaus of violence swam before her eyes like afterimages, floating and vibrant, like the mirage of dead men she had conjured up in her first hearing. The familiar sense of being, and not being, almost watching herself and waiting for her own reaction fell over her.

The reality and possibility of those scenarios made her still hungry stomach roil. It was the same revolution she would have seeing smashed windows of a chapel, the invasion of hatred into sacred calm. Those tableaus were their inevitability, but they were not for today. Not today-just not today, just one more day…

_I'll think about it tomorrow._

Instead, she took her gun, and fished his knife from his trouser's pocket where they lay folded on her hamper, and placed both on the bedside table. When he woke, he would see she was not hiding away with both of their weapons and murderous intent.

Starling was not fool enough to believe that a good rest and a pleasant morning could change one's entire house, but the kitchen did look brighter. More white and clean than cold and barren. There was fresh snow outside, flakes still struggling to fall and survive the sun's warmth.

Clarice also did not trick herself into thinking she could attempt to cook breakfast in some well-meaning act of hosting. Best to stick with what she knew-toast and coffee. Like her perfume, her coffee things were the only luxury she allowed herself. Her coffee maker was always updated, and she had the best cream. It even came in a little glass bottle. But that was as far as her adventurous spirit went in the realm of cooking. But she could at least dress that up.

Ardelia not only allowed Clarice to enter her side of the duplex but when it came to food, encouraged her. Whether it was concern for Clarice's dwindling frame and bouts of drinking or simply to save herself from the stench of burning food wafting from the other side of the building, the invitation was open even when she was gone-so long as nothing was _left_ from her time there. Starling quickly snuck a bar of the 'good' imported Irish butter from Ardelia's fridge, as well as a pot of jam.

She hesitated at her tea cabinet. After sparing the innocent flower painted container that housed the strong herbal leaves Mapp liked to prescribe a glare, Clarice peered at the other boxes of more pleasant flavors. Figuring that it was just like coffee in its creation (dried plant and hot water), she snatched a nice-sounding black tea as well. Lecter seemed like a tea man.

Humming to the tune of Mapp's antique clock striking noon, she returned to the kitchen-

-And nearly dropped her burden, seeing Jack Crawford standing in her back doorway. He was leaning in, one foot over the threshold, one hand still on the doorknob, the other carrying a white pastry box tied with thin red and white twine. Snow collected on his shoulders like dust on a tin soldier.

"Mr-" Starling, arrested, cleared her throat. Not too loud-not too shrill-because above her was a monster lightly sleeping. "Mr. Crawford?"

Oh God, the monster upstairs. The monster she had been so careful to keep trust with. The monster that _loathed_ Crawford. A monster with superb hearing and a monster who would not hesitate to rip Jack Crawford in half. And here the man was, in his old brown overcoat and hat slightly floppy from years of use, served up like a Christmas gift. _Then we'd have bacon_. She almost gagged, whether to hide a spout of hysterical laughter or a wretch at her own humor.

"Starling-I'm sorry. I…" He gestured behind him to the driveway. "I saw your car, and when no one answered I got worried."

Her heart lodged in her throat. Knocking-Christ. How had she not heard? How had she been so stupid? Lost in the thoughts of making fucking _breakfast_. Where was her head, _Clarice, you fucking moron. A good roll in the hay and you can't even hear someone knock at your door? _The old familiar voice of censure returned with a vengeance, like Miggs reaching out from his cell, splattering her face with shame. _What now? Think, think, think..._

If Lecter hadn't woken form that, he'd wake to hear their voices, for sure. She couldn't bet on him being as clouded by good fucking as she was. He would see her gun and know she was unarmed. Would he logic out the situation? Maybe, maybe there was a slim chance he wouldn't kill her-not while she was wearing his gift.

His gift. Putting the tea down with one hand, she wrapped her robe tightly about herself. Jack's eyes flickered down and she saw him swallow. She felt his eyes moving over her body, decently covered but barefoot and thinly clad, like feeling the grime of sweat and dirt after a run. He made her feel unclean in her fresh pretty silks-and guilty for thinking it of him, her last guardian angel in the FBI.

Oh God, if Lecter saw this-she wearing his gift in front of Crawford-it would be too good for him to pass up. He'd probably even come down naked, to get at Jack, show him just what this was before killing him.

She could see it play out in her head as vivid as her visions of murder before, and it made her just as sick. Still, her thoughts were captured, her tongue detained from words. What could she say to make him go?

He placed the box on the kitchen counter, taking a step into the kitchen. "I just...well I knew you were spending Christmas alone and I thought I'd check up on you. No one's heard from you for a while."

"I...I needed to be by myself."

"I understand. But it's not good to be too on your own. I thought since we're both by ourselves for Christmas that I'd bring over-"

Starling barely had time to register either the bitter comfort that he cared enough to come or the bitter resentment of his lie-there was no one left to hear from her even if she had tried-when above them, a faucet turned in her bathroom ran.

The monster was awake.

Both agent's heads snapped towards heaven. Jack looked at her again, about to question, and Clarice saw his eyes drift beyond her. "Oh."

What emotion was packed into that syllable, barely a grunt! Surprise, hurt...anger. Clarice followed his gaze and almost swayed on her feet. There on the table was a fine black fedora, a pair of leather gloves tossed over it, like a marker in the forest, claiming its territory.

"I-"

"No, I'm sorry." Jack smiled, and Clarice noticed every crack and wrinkle in his skin. When had he last smiled, even as falsely as he did now? "I shouldn't have assumed."

"Jack-"

But he wouldn't let her. His comfort, scant and barely warm as it was, was slipping from her fingers, a burden too heavy to bear like a lamb in frigid arms, sliding from her grip to the ground no matter how hard she tried to clutch it and save it from for the slaughter; from destruction. "No, Starling. Don't worry. I won't ask."

Destroyed.

For a bizarre, irrational moment, Clarice felt she might cry again. In that moment, something deep inside her cracked through the conscious earth of her mind, like a shoot finally reaching towards the sun of her consciousness.

Starling _wanted _Jack to ask, she wanted Jack to grow protective and inquisitive. She wanted this man to whom she looked up to almost like a mentor to demand a name and face, to demand facts and events, and to_ make sure she was alright_, as he had claimed minutes before. Wanted Jack to try and storm up those stairs and see who left their hat like a ward against other males in her kitchen. She almost wanted to see it play out-lover and mentor fighting, sparring and spitting over her. She wanted Jack to protect her, however useless and unneeded it was.

She wanted someone to fight for her, battle-hardened and war-weary as she was.

Starling wanted Jack to reach beyond his own discomfort _for once_ and take her into his care. _Just care, just for a second. Care _enough.

Jack stepped back, never realizing the gulf he created between them in the kitchen mirrored in Clarice's heart. He was a teacher by trade, and finally, his fist and best lesson was driven home in a way she would never forget.

Jack, and everyone like him, would never love her beyond his own uses. _Do not fall in love with the Bureau..._

And then his eyes raked over her one last time-and her first, most loyal lover returned.

_Rage_.

How _dare_ he look at her like that? That thinly veiled disapproval, looking for a flaw and taking in the curves along the way. All of them did that. Whether it was her hair when it slipped from her tail, or her ankles or her blouse when she chose to attempt style. Her parts were ripped and sold separately, auctioned off, and graded on a mental scale that was mired in their lust, never willing to buy wholesale of Starling.

She hated it and had felt shamed by it. Stopped styling her hair, stopped wearing skirts, stopped heels and tailored jackets, and even jewelry. And she hated every moment of it, siphoning off these edges of herself to desperately fit into an ever-changing puzzle slot for them, for their wants and demands. Clarice hated them for it.

But standing here watching his retreating back Starling found she hated Jack most of all.

Starling knew Jack wanted it too, even if he could not admit it to himself. That was what his coldness and arm's length distance meant. Clarice knew she would wear his shame for desiring her forever, like a scarlet letter stitched into her flesh: B for Bella.

Clarice loathed cowardly men who hid their displeasure behind subpoenas and drops of poison in personal files. Who dealt in dark backrooms and whispers rather than in the light of day, cloaked their desires in feint praise and neglect, in interesting errands and fool's protection.

Cowards, all of them. Wanting her and none brave enough to admit it, hating her and none courageous enough to tell her plain to her face. Words locked behind frowning lips, sentiments buried in dry broken hearts stuck in time, buried with beloved wives. Starling was tough enough to withstand it, having been broken and reformed again and again; the strongest place on the bone, surrounded by arthritic fucking cowards.

"I'll call later. Goodbye Starling."

And for the last time, Clarice replied, "Goodbye, Mr. Crawford."

Anger was familiar and faithful by her side, keeping her warm, giving her purpose. But this rage was a new, wild, and freed from the affection and respect that once tempered it. She wanted to scream, a betrayed howl of an acolyte recognizing a false leader, a foolish guru, and ignorant master. It was too large for her chest, and she almost began panting to expel it.

Just the same just like them-no, worse. They hid their desires, yes. Those suits who watched her ankles more than her legs. They did not give her kindness, give her hope and false protection to cover their lust. False love was worse than cloaked hatred. She found in that moment she respected Chilton more than Jack. At least he'd made his lewd desires plain.

She looked at the glass jars she still held, and her grip tightened. It was a miracle when only the clink of her setting them down was heard rather than the total shatter of it being thrown.

Above the faucet turned off.

Blindly she stormed up the stairs. Flushed and angry, so very very angry. New rage, new emotions, new wants, and a new perspective gave her vertigo, like standing in a tall tower looking down and feeling your own mortality.

Starling burst into her bedroom just as Lecter stepped out of the bathroom. He had taken the towel again, and his face was freshly shaven. Behind him the bed was already nicely made, the curtains cracked to let in some light. He paused, took in her flushed cheeks, her bright eyes-alive with rage and a fresh sheen of tears. Immediately he was by her side, lips parted to speak, one hand holding her warm face. Then he stopped and inhaled.

He could smell Jack on her, the lingering scent of pipe smoke from a pipe the man did not have and alka seltzer that always stuck. Whether he knew it was Crawford's smell or simply that of another person, Clarice did not know nor have time to find out.

All she saw was his brows knit before her hands shot out and grabbed fistfuls of his hair, pulling him down. His soft mouth bruised against her teeth, and she knew she drew blood, but Clarice did not release him. Her nose was hurting from digging into his cheek, and she had iron on her tongue, but she still did not stop holding him down to her so much so he had to stoop their difference.

She shoved, and Lecter stumbled back until his knees hit the bed. He reached for her and Starling nearly slapped his hands away and shoved again until he sat, looking wild and perhaps even a little apprehensive. Ah, what was this, fear? Good, he was right to fear her, it showed character, even a little wisdom. Only fools felt invincible, and Hannibal Lecter was no fool as he watched Clarice, eyedher hands as she swept her hair back from her shoulders and in a sloppy knot.

They all wanted to use her, they all wanted what she desperately kept from them. Her love, physical, and ephemeral. She gave her loyalty, her mind, and her body as a shield. But she had not let any one of them near her heart or her bed. And they tried to destroy Starling for it-tried to _kill _her by proxy because her loyalty was to her own morales, untouched by their reeducation. Those good lawful men would have nothing but the ash of her former vows in their mouths and the chill of their empty sheets and resentful wives, dead and alive.

Well, she had learned their lessons alright, the ones too slippery for the books that sat in her closet, untouched since the Academy.

Hannibal Lecter-murderer, monster, devil-would have what all of them wished. And he would have it freely-_gladly_. Fuck them all. Let the hour strike twelve, let whatever was to descend come. She wasn't afraid of it any longer, she didn't care any longer.

Clarice stalked closer to the man half sprawled and still as stone, watching for her next move. She approached him as she had the training field on the first day of the Academy, full of purpose, and maybe some reverence for her choice. She could see it in her mind's eye, the plaques nailed to the tree that prophesied her future.

_HURT AGONY PAIN_

_LOVE - IT_

Well, Starling had hurt, and she had felt agony when Johnny died and had been in bleeding pain for so long. But she no longer loved it. Clarice no longer loved the Beau for it did not love her back.

And with clarity she would marvel at later, she countered this revelation with a thought Starling knew to be true with her whole being. As she gazed down at her sometimes lover, her mind hissed _but here is someone who does._

Starling would give him the crude scenario and selfish exchange she knew was etched into most men's mind, she'd give it to him gladly for it was a gift he did not want. Knees on her hard floor, she signaled her intent and the doctor reached out to halt her shoulders. Grabbing wrists and pinning them to the mattress with more strength than he perhaps thought she had, the towel was tugged away by her teeth and she felt his legs against her chest jump-either from the cold air or the viciousness of her action. Clarice felt strain in his wrists as he tried to sit up, but a hand against his stomach, shoving again, cured him of the notion.

Those fingers slid along the flat smooth plain of his belly, stretching almost to his sternum. Rather than attempt to thwart her again, his fingers curled around her wrist, holding it to him. She glanced up, only a second, to see him staring resolutely at the ceiling, submitting. It was almost serene, almost funny when the next moment his breath caught. His back completed an arch above the mattress, the muscles tensing, fingers gripping her free hand tightly where it rested on his chest.

Starling might have laughed at the breathless words that escaped his almost mute mouth, had her own been free. She wished she could understand their lettering-still in his mother tongue-but she knew their substance. The doctor finally sat up, and his fingers threaded through her hair, following her actions rather than to encourage. Each beleaguered pant she heard beat in time with her heart, and she followed that rhythm as a guide until his fingers twisted and pulled her from her task.

Starling did not have a chance to growl her displeasure. His mouth returned the favor of a vicious kiss. Lecter's hand still tight in her hair pulled her head back, his lips next on her neck. He gave her as much mercy as he was shown, and Clarice bore a brand framed with teeth marks on her throat for it.

Her back hit the mattress, and her arms stretched out to welcome him as he followed her onto the bed. The fingers that had grasped her hand almost sweetly moments before now wrapped around her throat, to hold rather than harm. But into his fearful growl of "_Tu esi _mano_!_" Clarice only smiled and tilted her chin up, offering her mouth again.

This was what she wanted, and without asking he provided. Starling wanted to be _wanted_. To be desired, for more than just flesh and length of bone. Wanted her lover to fight for her, to stake a claim, and remain unbowed in it. This man would not leave, would not remove his hands for fear of coming away stained as she was, dropping her when her fire burned too bright. No, he ran towards the light of her flame and burned with her.

Trial by fire, the doctor had earned her trust and her desire. And she did not know how (though at the moment it was rather hard to think as he applied his new knowledge of her pleasures) but she was not about to let anyone steal this, too, from her. Steal-

"Hannibal!"

The doctor's head lifted, his body stilling as if shot, full weight bearing down on her, trapping her against the mattress. In all their times together, despite her natural vocal tendencies she had ever whimpered his title in a fit of pleasure. Softly pleaded _doctors_ fell from her lips, drunk up by his own to stem the leak. He pulled one hand from where it had explored her breast, returning to her throat. But now the touch gentled, thumb tracing the pliant skin of her lip.

"Hannibal," she murmured again. Starling, aware of him and all he was, coated his name in such pure wanting, that the monster felt the vengeful possessiveness bleed from him. She said it again, more a request as she shifted under his weight, flushed and wanting.

The doctor shifted to his elbows, his hands cradling her head. Their foreheads met, and as he began again, Clarice stared into his eyes. Those red eyes gone black with desire, and behind them there lay such darkness; shadows and bitterness without end. But Starling was fire and honey, and as they lay tangled in the aftermath, she contemplated how suited their natures were. It was simple.

_Simplicity, what is it in itself? What is its nature?_

Lecter was hunted without a protector, and Starling was a protector without a flock. She would not let the FBI, the world or even the past take her small scant of happiness.

No matter what it took.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art Referenced:
> 
> The Arrest of Anne Boleyn at Greenwich by David Wilkie Wynfield


End file.
